🧰Neo Angband: ModForge v0.1.0

The first version. Nothing here has been released, so there is nothing to compare it against; what follows is what it does.

Added

• A workshop for making mods, opened from a tab in the corner of the screen. It runs as a real interface in the page the game already occupies, takes the keyboard while it is open, and gives it back when it closes. Nothing it does touches the game until a mod is installed.

• New records, in any of the record files the game composes one at a time. Based on something that already exists: the new record inherits the shape and the scale of its nearest comparable and none of its powers, so a new orc arrives with the orc’s hit points and no attacks until the author says otherwise.

• Adjustments to records the base game or another mod owns. The mod ships the difference rather than the record, so two mods adjusting different fields of one record both work.

• One numeric adjustment across a filtered set of records at once, with a preview of what it does before it is applied. Each record gets its own entry, so another mod’s unrelated change to any of them still composes.

• Removal of a record, offered last, in the dangerous colour, with the reference spelled out.

• The evidence behind every number. Each suggested value carries the sentence saying where it came from, and an evidence table beside the editor shows the comparable records with the focused field highlighted.

• Checks as the author types, separated into errors, warnings and advice, with a pane that never empties while a newer answer is being computed. Clicking a finding goes to the field it is about.

• The manifest paperwork written from what the author actually did: the dependency on a pack whose record is being adjusted, written at the moment that record is chosen; the load-order group, from whether the mod adds or only adjusts; an engine range that is a minimum rather than a pin, and which the workshop refuses to write in a form that would exclude the build it is running on; and a repository address that is obviously the author’s own rather than a plausible URL belonging to somebody else.

• Gestures that emit the composable op rather than the outcome. Nudging a number writes “three more than whatever this is”. Ticking a flag writes “add this flag”. Adding a row to a table writes “append this”. All three coexist with another mod doing the same thing to the same record; writing the outcome would not, and the review screen says which of an author’s changes are which.

• A JSON box on every container, parsed on commit, so no shape in any record file is unreachable.

• Undo and redo, over every change to a mod, from the title bar or from Ctrl+Z.

• The finished mod as a file, always, whether or not the game offers a way to install one in place. The file is a zip the mod manager’s own Import a zip accepts, and it is the only copy of the work that exists outside the browser.

• Try it in the game, one button, from every screen a mod is open on. It forges the mod, loads it for the rest of the session without adding it to the player’s mods, and reloads the game so it takes effect - composing content always needs a reload. The pack composes exactly as an installed one does and is forgotten when the game is closed, so the build, look, change loop leaves nothing behind in the library. The button says the half that “just for this session” hides: this is the real mod and not a preview, so the character who plays it keeps whatever it does to them, and next launch, with the pack gone, the game treats anything it added as belonging to something that is not installed. The review screen is still there, with the errors and the files and the manifest, and looking first is no longer compulsory in order to try something.

• A Test panel that arranges the game around the thing you just made. Testing one record means arranging everything around it: a monster written for dungeon level forty says nothing on level one, and an item balanced for a hundred hit points says nothing to a character with nine. So the panel carries the game’s own debug set - go to a depth, gain experience, set gold and stats, acquire items, summon, banish, teleport, map the level, light it, learn every item and creature - rather than a spawn button with extras.

  Its browser lists everything the running game has, with the author’s own content at the top and marked with the pack that added it. That ordering is read off each record’s own provenance, so the workshop keeps no list of what the base game contains, which is a list that would be wrong the first time the game added a monster. It is not limited to the mod’s own content: the filter turns off, because the record an author is modelling theirs on is the thing they most often want to test against.

  Not one control on it works until the panel has stopped this session being saved, which is one button and cannot be undone. The character on disk keeps whatever their last save left and nothing after that is ever written, so testing can never spoil a character somebody is keeping - and a session tested in is a session thrown away. The panel names the character and says all of it before the button that spends it. Off by default, and the setting’s own description says the same thing.

• The mod as its own text files, editable, for authors who outgrow the screens. Reached with Edit the files directly from a mod’s page. It lists every file the folder ships and opens any of them in an editor with line numbers, syntax colouring for JSON and JavaScript, bracket matching, Tab and Shift-Tab to indent and outdent, find, a line and column readout, and a save chord.

  Brackets and quotes close themselves, under four rules that are the whole difference between the feature and a nuisance. A pair appears only where a closer could go, so typing ( in front of a word inserts one character. Typing a closer that is already there steps over it. Backspace or Delete between an empty pair takes both. A selection is wrapped rather than replaced. Enter inside an empty pair opens the block with the closer on its own line, so the auto-indent and the auto-close do not fight. JSON pairs the one quote it has; Markdown and plain text pair nothing, because prose is full of brackets that never close.

  It is the same mod, printed, and not a second copy of it. A monster added on the record screen is in monster.json there; a number changed there is what the record screen shows next time. Saving a file parses the text back into the same document every other screen edits, through the same undo. A file that has moved in the mod since it was opened is not written over silently: the save is refused and the choice between keeping what is in the editor and starting again from what the mod says is offered as two buttons.

  Three things are only possible this way. A hand-written plugin.js, which needs no build step and makes this the first version that can produce a mod that runs code - the manifest grows the plugin facet and the modApi number from the same condition that notices the file, because either alone is a mod that installs and does nothing. A manifest key no screen offers, capabilities and rules among them, kept exactly as typed through every later save. And a record file grouped into sections, or anything else a record file can carry.

  A record file is checked against the same constraints the record screens enforce, as it is typed, with the finding on the line that caused it. The text is parsed through the same code a save goes through, composed on top of the game and handed to the engine’s own record checker, so a value of the wrong type for a known field, a field name spelled wrong, a reference to something nothing defines and a record that will never be generated are all named here and not only at review time. A finding whose record cannot be identified beyond doubt is shown without a line rather than pointed at a guess.

  One rule is the workshop’s own and is labelled so: a value outside the closed set the game’s own records use for that field. The engine’s checker will not say this, deliberately, because a mod coining a new value is doing something legal - so it is a hint, its rule id is namespaced workshop/, and the pane says the game will not repeat it. It catches the one mistake nothing else can see, which is a perfectly good string of the right type in a field that exists, spelled wrong.

  What it does not claim. A JSON file is checked by the same parser the game uses, so a clean answer is a real one. Where this game cannot lend the workshop its own record checker, a row at the top of the pane says so and cannot be dismissed, and the rows below it come from the workshop’s smaller stand-in. A clean file is not a clean mod, so the pane also counts what the same check found elsewhere. A script is checked for quotes, comments and brackets, and the pane says in as many words that this is not a syntax check and that code passing it can still be wrong. Anything in a record file the workshop cannot model is written through unread, and both the file editor and the review screen name the file and the keys and say the verdict does not cover them.

• A guide covering the four things people usually make, each card naming the game’s own written tutorial for the same idea, plus a card for everything the workshop cannot reach and where to read about it.

• A parchment treatment, for anybody who prefers ink on paper to lamplight on stone.

Known limitations, stated here because they change what the mod is

• The numbers are a demonstration. Two of the engine seams this needs do not exist, so the records the workshop draws its evidence from are its own fixture of a few dozen invented entries rather than the game’s own content. Every suggestion, every evidence table and every usage share is therefore about the fixture. A banner says so and cannot be dismissed, and the validator returns a note on every call saying that its checks are the workshop’s own small set and not the game’s. docs/ENGINE_SEAMS.md specifies every seam; PLANNED.md records what each one blocks.
• A mod that ships a script cannot be tried for a session. That door takes content only: it refuses an archive holding a script of any kind at any depth, and one whose manifest asks for a capability. So the moment a mod grows either, the one-button loop is off, with the reason on the button, and the route is the file and the mod manager’s own import. That is the right boundary rather than a gap - a mod that runs code should arrive through the door that asks the player first - and nothing is requested to change it.
• A finished mod is either tried for the session or saved as a file and added through the mod manager. There is deliberately no way for a mod to put another mod into the library for keeps: that would be an elevated permission bought for a convenience the one-button session loop already provides, and permanence is exactly the part a player should visit the mod manager for. PLANNED.md records the argument.
• What is temporary about trying a mod is the mod, not what it does. The archive is forgotten; a character it changed stays changed, and the values seen at save time can differ next launch because a pack’s adjustments live in the composition rather than in the save. The lifetime is also a convention rather than a boundary: a browser that restores a closed window restores the staged mod with it, which is why the game lists it, marks it, and offers a way to drop it.
• Unfinished work can be lost. Drafts live in this install’s own settings, whose write path catches a quota error and logs it rather than failing. Every write is read back and a failure is reported at the moment it happens, and the workshop caps what it will try to store, but the file is the only save point it will promise.
• The tab is absent on a few of the game’s screens, and back on the next frame.
• The workshop writes content, not code, and text, not pictures. A new monster with no tile falls back to its letter.