General Modding question: do you use an IDE

[jakt]

Hi

I'm looking to do some mods finally. I had grand plans for EU4, and I set up an eclipse workspace and local SVN to track changes, but I got distracted and never did anything with it. Now with the rather limitless possibilities of space I think I'd like to give it another go. So my question is, do you use an IDE to mod with? If so, which IDE? And if so, are there any plugins to help? Eclipse worked great to be able to see what I changed (with version control) and for finding things, but had no help on syntax or anything. I'm a lazy Java developer who relies on such things to help.

Regardless of what you use (or don't) how do you deal with changes to the base game? Do you have a version control to check against?

Am I totally overthinking all of this?

Thanks

 

[Ekyman]

Based on what I see mentioned in comments around here, I think the vast majority of Paradox modders use Notepad++, which is a very good text editor. An IDE seems like overkill given that all you're editing is text files and the occasional Lua file, and if you want to use version control you can do that independent of an IDE. Some games have community-made syntax highlighting and autocomplete plugins for Notepad++; some don't or have very outdated ones. For incorporating changes to the base game use a merge tool like WinMerge (my preferred choice) or KDiff3.

 

[Idhrendur]

I'm all about the source control (a good habit from my converter work that also works well with mods). But for the mods themselves, I just use Notepad++. Somewhere on the forums there's a plugin that adds syntax highlighting for Paradox script to it.

 

[potatomcwhiskey]

I'm all about the source control (a good habit from my converter work that also works well with mods). But for the mods themselves, I just use Notepad++. Somewhere on the forums there's a plugin that adds syntax highlighting for Paradox script to it.

If you know where that is I'd be eternally Grateful.

 

[Idhrendur]

If you know where that is I'd be eternally Grateful.

A quick look through my followed threads shows it over on the CK2 forum: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-defined-language-and-auto-completion.745679/

There's an updated version on the last page. It's definitely CK2 focused, but maybe that's an initial something to develop for the Stellaris crowd.