Mod downloader support?

[snoozbuster]

I was looking at the gamebanana API, which as far as I know is the premiere source for switch game mods. I'd love to fork this project and see if I can add support to it to be able to browse mods on gamebanana and directly download them to be applied (using the pre-existing functionality), sorta like how the HB app store works but for game mods. Caveat: I haven't done any C programming in a long time and haven't done any switch programming before at all, so who knows if I will even be successful in any of this.

I'm definitely not asking for someone to do this for me, but it would help me a ton if I could get some primer resources on things like:

• how to read installed switch titles
• how to initialize the network stack and make requests out
• the basic architecture of the app and what parts I would be especially interested in for a project like this

Feel free to redirect me to a wiki or other switch library docs for the first two, happy to read those myself I just don't know where to start (and either way, knowing the basic app architecture would be incredibly useful).

If I was successful in adding this in a fork - would you be interested in integrating it back into upstream? I'd be happy to open a PR.

[KP2048]

the problem with this is that there isn't any well defined format for the mod archives. the current method rely on a human deciding what goes where

[KP2048]

you could have a prompt for the user to choose the root directory of the mod, but there aren't many other options

[KP2048]

for the web requests, there is the curl portlib.

for title stuff look at how goldleaf does it https://github.com/XorTroll/Goldleaf/blob/e71fd36546975c579f6606133e13d588bd6b1a55/Goldleaf/source/hos/hos_Titles.cpp#L216

and as for the structure, look at the changes i made in my fork when i added the plugin browser page

[KP2048]

if you need help setting things up just ask :)

[KP2048]

I recommend working off of my fork until it gets merged because i fixed some compile issues from my last merge.

[snoozbuster]

interesting, I will have to download some mods off gamebanana for testing. I thought the format was pretty standard, or at least of the mods I've downloaded I thought the process was the same for each of them. I guess its kinda up to the mod packager though huh

[snoozbuster]

thanks for the other tips, those will be very useful

[KP2048]

Example: https://gamebanana.com/mods/353943

Vs

https://gamebanana.com/mods/358217

[KP2048]

I recommend extracting the archive to a temporary location, prompting the user to rearrange / create folders then select a directory to use as the root (/mods/\<game>/\<mod>/contents/\<titleid>/\<selected folder contents>

[KP2048]

https://switchbrew.github.io/libnx/ns_8h.html#a801a457720759c13f79ab31df1e82c51

For listing titles

[snoozbuster]

Appreciate it! I’ll definitely take a look at all this. I’ve been caught up in work and the new Destiny 2 DLC - but I’ll definitely be back to spend some time on this soon!

[KP2048]

https://github.com/withertech/NXModToolkit

maybe generate one of these from the gamebanana download? and add support for them in SMM? It would have a lot more metadata then just a folder which could be gleaned from gamebanana api. icons and author and description and even dependencies! (There is probably not a good way to resolve dependencies on gamebanana so the field can be unused. I put it there for future use. Maybe user repos like in tinfoil?)

[KP2048]

Example mod (.nxmod is just a renamed zip file with some metadata in a json and a MANIFEST file containing relative paths of all the mod files relative to :/data/ where all the mod files are) example.zip

Python wheel for the completed toolkit NXModToolkit-1.0.dev0-py3-none-any.zip Now on PyPi NXModToolkit

JSON Schema for mod.json https://withertech.com/SimpleModManagerMod.json

[KP2048]

(Wait till my fork gets re merged to fix those dumb compile errors) (If you're impatient you can fetch upstream when it gets merged and code blind until then)