Newbie - Should I take the plunge?

[Faugaun]

OK....well hmmm...I am interested in giving a go at the add-on development world.

Not exactly sure what I am getting into though. Let me give some background on me.

1989'ish I would edit code in qbasic
1995'ish I created website with Angel fire HTML style - it sucked but I was in middle school.
1998'ish I did the script kiddie thing with MUDs
2001 I graduated Highschool and went to college
2001-2002 I took Visual Basic, wrote a calculator program and a hello world program and a few others, Took Cobal wrote some painfully tedious programs with this and Took and failed Java (apparently sleeping through class = fail)...also took a course concepts of programming (basically flowcharts and algorythm design). I then decided computer science made my hobby (computers) less fun and changed majors.
2012 - Coded from scratch a java based hello world android app
2013 - developed decent skills programming in statistical software packages (SAS and R) and I am fairly comfortable with those.

Anyways so I've been thinking about trying out addons though ATM I don't have a project idea and I dunno exactly how big a hole I am jumping into. Reading a few online guides it seems I just need a text editor and to get familiarity with the api functions that I might want to use and the rest seems like formatting, matrixes, and standard program logic (if then else end) and assigning values to functions that are predefined or defining new functions.

OK, well I kinda lied I do have a project idea but its not very well developed...basically a data gathering add-on that creates a data table based on skills and character stats for back end analysis (this wouldn't be pushed to the depository unless I could find a way to incorporate the data analysis component in an automated fashion within the add-on and thus provide useful information to the end user).

I guess what I am interested in knowing:

Will my previous coding help me jump into the addons world or am I starting at a very basic level?
Is there room for another add-on developer or the table is pretty full ATM?
A suggestion on a starter add-on to get me up to speed?
Any other advice you might give a newcomer?

Also it seems there are three main file types utilized

.txt (text editor simple)
.lua (looks like this could be done in notepad and saved in the correct format? Is there a better way, especially for debugging etc...?)
.xml (again like lua this seems like notepad and saving in correct file type? But perhaps there is a better way?)

I think that covers it so thanks in advance.

[votan]

Originally Posted by Faugaun Also it seems there are three main file types utilized .txt (text editor simple) .lua (looks like this could be done in notepad and saved in the correct format? Is there a better way, especially for debugging etc...?) .xml (again like lua this seems like notepad and saving in correct file type? But perhaps there is a better way?)

Welcome!

Good to know links:
Overview to get started:
http://wiki.esoui.com/

Add-on skeleton:
http://www.esoui.com/downloads/info7...leCreator.html

Editor:
http://www.esoui.com/downloads/info5...DevPlugin.html

ESO strings:
http://www.esoui.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1443

For ideas and wishes:
http://www.esoui.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=165

Advanced:
Source Code (as documentation)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/26jr2mrg89...6-PTS.zip?dl=0

LUA do's and donot's:
http://www.lua.org/gems/sample.pdf

edit 1: ESO LUA handles string in ANSI. But if a string as a byte sequence is valid utf-8, the game will print it correctly. (If the font contains the chars)
edit 2: LUA is one-based, but slotIndex (bags) is zero-based!

Good Luck

[Faugaun]

Thanks,

I will read these over.

[katkat42]

Votan and Garkin pretty much covered it. I just want to add a reference to zgoo, an addon that shows you the complete contents of the global namespace in the game. It lets you see the contents of every global variable, and is invaluable for debugging (among other things).

[circonian]

Welcome !
I created a tutorial for creating a working stamina bar replacement. It starts with explaining the different files & file structure, and well a lot of stuff. It explains every step & every line of code walking through the creation bit by bit. Its very detailed, and thus pretty long. Its broken into 3 parts,

1. creating the working stamina bar,
2. working with saved variables (a continuation of the stamina bar project applying savable settings)
3. creating settings menus (a continuation of the stamina bar, creating settings menus)

The Creating Settings Menus explains about libraries, library structure (how to set them up), how to save & load settings using the saved variables, ...but in the last section the code for "Creating the Settings Menu" uses LibAddonMenu 1.0, which is out of date. I should fix that.

Its posted on the esoui wiki main page or you can find it here: Circonians Stamina Bar Tutorial

[Faugaun]

Thanks for all the input.

I've read most of the materials provided (sorry circonian I skipped half of your 3rd tutorial ...will come back too it when I'm ready to create settings). I may have skimmed a couple other sections but I think I've got a decent grasp on the bulk of it (well as good as you can without jumping in).

Thanks for the material everyone.

One last question, is there a good text editor for this work on android? I know its an odd question but the bulk of the time I could use for working on this I will only have access to my tablet and a RDP setup just doesn't sound fun.

Edit: Found a few android options with a brief search think I will give this (https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...maScript&hl=en) a shot unless someone has experience with something known to be good.

[Garkin]

Try Turbo Editor (https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...kyn.fileeditor) or DroidEdit (https://play.google.com/store/apps/d....aor.droidedit).

[Garkin]

Originally Posted by Faugaun Will my previous coding help me jump into the addons world or am I starting at a very basic level?

Your previous experience will be definitely helpful, because you have an idea how to write code. Now, you have just to learn what are differences between Lua and the language you have used before.
For example: http://www.luafaq.org/gotchas.html

Originally Posted by Faugaun Is there room for another add-on developer or the table is pretty full ATM?

There is always room for another active addon author.

Originally Posted by Faugaun A suggestion on a starter add-on to get me up to speed?

It depends what you want to do. If I want to change what is already in UI, I will take a look into the documentation and to EsoUI source code. If I want to add something to the UI, I always check if there is an addon which does similar thing to get reference how it could be done.

Documentation is attached to this posts:
Update 5: http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/135893/
Update 6 (PTS): http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/148362/

Source:
http://esodata.uesp.net/100010/ (or files EsoUI-1.5.8.zip and EsoUI-1.6-PTS.zip in my Dropbox folder)

Originally Posted by Faugaun Any other advice you might give a newcomer?

Not really. Just check tutorials here http://wiki.esoui.com/Main_Page, read through code of another addons and try to make some changes. After a while you will have an idea how things work and you can start writing your own addons.

Just a few tips what you should have in mind - if you are going to publish your addons, make sure that they are working alone as well as with other addons. If you are using libraries, do not forget to include them in addon manifest (.txt fle). Make sure that in your code is exposed just what you want to make accessible for other addons, because it will be very difficult to catch bugs when your addon is using global variables which could be easily redefined by another addon. Best practise is making variables and functions local or as keys in one global table.

Originally Posted by Faugaun Also it seems there are three main file types utilized .txt (text editor simple) .lua (looks like this could be done in notepad and saved in the correct format? Is there a better way, especially for debugging etc...?) .xml (again like lua this seems like notepad and saving in correct file type? But perhaps there is a better way?) I think that covers it so thanks in advance.

Use some text editor with syntax highlighting, it makes editing code much easier.
Notepad++: http://notepad-plus-plus.org/
PSPad: http://www.pspad.com/
UltraEdit: http://www.ultraedit.com/