4. External Editor

External Editor


  • Hello everyone, here i am again with my noob issues...

    I'm trying to find an external editor to play Screeps. I've been trying to find it through the web. Devs say i can use Grunt, but i cant find any download link at its website (i feel stupid, yes...) It says i also need Nodejs installed, and signed into NPM website with the same result, so i'm pretty frustrated atm.

    Then i googled about external editors for Screeps, but for most i found i have to pay 😞

    Can you guys recommend me an external editor i can use for free to play Screeps, and if possible, having a comprehensive installation guide for noobs?

    P.S. Also...my english sucks, which doesn't help at all.

    1 Reply
  • Dev Team

    I was using Microsoft Visual Studio Code for a long time, it's free, lightweight and generally cool.

    👆

  • @calfa Which OS are you using?

    1 Reply

  • @duckymirror I'm using Windows 10.

    @o4kapuk I'm going to take a look at Visual Studio, thank you!! I remember i tried once and didn't get to enable autocomplete for Screeps, tho hehe

    EDIT: I kind of understand a few more things now. To get Autocomplete to work i have to install a non default feature on Visual Studio Community (ASP.NET), and then i'll be able to follow the next instructions. However, Visual Studio Community i have is a trial version with 20 days remaining.

    Can you please tell me how to install this library (?) on Visual Studio Code which is free? Is it actuallty possible?

    1 Reply

  • @calfa If you don't already use it I recommend the package manager Chocolatey and Chocolatey GUI (choco install ChocolateyGUI in command line). It makes installing the tools you need easier. Via Chocolatey you can install NodeJS which already includes NPM and Visual Studio Code if you haven't already. Then you can follow the external commit page in the Screeps docs. There are also other ways of committing your scripts: For example Rollup is used in screeps-typescript-starter template.

    I use TypeScript for my bot. There are Screeps API definitions on GitHub but I don't know whether there is something like that for JS.

    👏

  • Jo make sure you have Visual Studio Code <- that is electron based and completely different from Visual Studio Community Edition.
    That thing is a complete monster IDE for a lot of languages.
    Code is more like a coders pet very powerful if you teach it the right tricks 🙂

    👍
    1 Reply

  • @mrfaul That's the one i'm going to keep. Mainly because it's free and Screeps is the only reason i'm using it at this moment. I'll need some time to learn some of those tricks you mention, tho 😄

    @duckymirror That's fantastic!! I installed Chocolatey, and throuh it i also installed NodeJS. However, when i went to follow external commit page in the Screeps Docs i crashed against a wall, and when looking at that insane amount of information my english skills vanish (I'm spanish, in case i didn't mention before)

    Some (more) noob questions here:

    • Is grunt a code editor like VS Code? (i'm even afraid of asking this rofl)
    • Whether it is or not, how do i install it through Chocolatey?
    1 Reply

  • @calfa Grunt is a program that runs JS code to automate for example compiling and deploying. I haven't found it on Chocolatey but you can install it via NPM (npm install -g grunt-cli). I haven't worked with Grunt yet so I can't tell you very much about it.

    👆