¶ C# Scripting - Export/Import and Live Import are in public alpha
New major feature entering alpha phase - it is now possible to Export your C# Overlays/Actions (Triggers and Nodes are still not allowing that) into .sln solution.
¶ How is it useful ?
Modern IDEs provide a lot of QoL features without which it is inconvenient to do any kind of serious development. EA script editor will never be able to close that gap between "text editor with syntax highlighting and autocompletion" and real IDEs. It is a tool for script development, that is it.
But at that point set of features that EA SDK provides has gone far beyond what is required for usual scripting - you can create a full-blown program with NuGet packages
¶ Export
You can then open this solution in JetBrains Rider (recommended) or Microsoft Visual Studio.
Solution which you'll get will consist of one or multiple projects (depending on what you've exported). It is build-able and you can add unit-testshttps://www.jetbrains.com/help/rider/Getting_Started_with_Unit_Testing.html).
¶ Export/Import
Export I've already briefly covered, importing changes back is as simple as selecting Solution file you've previously exported. EA will load changes in source code files which you've made in IDE.
As solution can have multiple projects in it (e.g. unit-tests project), EA will try to match projects which you already have in the program (in a form of C# actions) to those in solution and will ignore those which it is not aware of.
¶ Live Import
Importing changes over and over and over again could be exhausting and is not even close to desired workflow.
That is where another feature comes into play.
Click on Live Import, select .sln and EA will start monitoring for any changes made in that directory where solution resides in. As soon as it will detect those changes, it will import them back to EA. Essentially, this make it so the code in C# action/overlay you're working on becomes live. This is especially noticeable for Overlays, which are inherently recompiled as soon as any changes are made. So as soon as you'll do some changes in Overlay code, it will be almost instantly picked up by EA, recompiled and loaded. Think of it as of ghetto spin-off of Hot Reload feature, but that works.
¶ Integration with .git
Git is a golden standard of version control systems. EA internally uses it for many things such as configuration version control. So it was just natural to set exported projects as git repositories during export. Whenever you're exporting/importing changes back to EA, it automatically creates git repository OR commits changes you've made. This makes it easy to rollback the code in case something goes wrong.
¶ Debugging
For now, you cannot debug or run the project from IDE. This will be one of the improvements I'll be working on in 2025. Eventually, you should be able to use EA as a script runner. But to make it happen I still have to do some changes.
¶ Bugfixes/Improvements
- [UI] Minor changes for the first start - event log panel is larger, Macro gets created instead of an aura
- [Scripting] Fixed a bug which lead to premature disposal of
ScriptingAPIs, this would correspondingly lead to disposal of OSD/Windows/etc created by script