Alternative plugin structure handling

[AndreLouisIssa]

Currently, the plugin structure is ideal for automatic installation with r2modman, this is obviously a priority.

But, there are other ways to install plugins that we may want to care about:

1. Cloning from upstream/working from source

   • in our source repos we do not have a manifest.json, but rather a thunderstore.toml
   • H2M should be able to read the thunderstore.toml to get the same information it would from manifest.json
   • also within the source repos is the src folder, which should not be unpacked, but should be read as if it was unpacked
   • if it were unpacked, it would not work with hot reloading, and it would add more to be put in .gitignore
   • practically I think this just means that instead of just looking for main.lua, it also looks for src/main.lua
   • if H2M finds the main.lua in src, it should change _PLUGIN.plugins_mod_folder_path to include src
   • plugins using this method will just have to be careful to use that instead of combining rom.paths.plugins_mod_folder with _PLUGIN.guid
   • that is rather complicated, but the friction between developing, testing, and uploading is a very real problem

2. Manual installation/unpacking downloaded zips

   • the thunderstore UI provides the option to manually download packages
   • but some packages contain the special inner folders such as plugins (and config and plugins_data?)
   • this makes them unsuitable for manual install
   • H2M could look within plugins for these special folders
   • in most cases it should suffice that the folders are unpacked like r2modman would do
   • devs having issues with this would just enclose their inner folders in src to get around it, but users can't do that

[xiaoxiao921]

Not really an issue about Hell2Modding but more an issue about the tooling around the template, some example for fixing such issues and the friction you are talking about:

Usage:

.\script.ps1 -sourceFolder "C:\Users\<USERNAME>\Desktop\hades2-mod-template" -pluginsFolder "C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\r2modmanPlus-local\HadesII\profiles\<PROFILENAME>\ReturnOfModding\plugins"

script.txt

• first parameter is folder path to the hades 2 modding template that you are currently using for your mod
• second parameter is the folder path to your currently used plugins folder it symlinks the stuff from your src folder to the plugins folder, and make a manifest.json from your toml file, and symlink it there too, the script can be expanded to be even more powerful but it should serve as a good baseline