VU Mods + Typescript

This is a boilerplate repository for writing mods for venice unleashed with typescript instead of lua. Actually, the typescript code is compiled to lua. But you still have all the nice typescript gains during development!

The repository contains demo code that was intended to be a anti-cheat mod. But I am too lazy to continue - but you might want to look into it to learn and get inspiration.

Thanks to TypeScriptToLua and typescript-tstl-plugin.

Prerequisites

• Node.js
• Yarn (or npm)

Getting started

# First setup: install dependencies
yarn install

# Compiles typescript to lua (automatically when files change!)
yarn dev

Folder structure:

• ext/
  • client/
    • __init__.ts

      client side entry point of your VU mod

  • server/
    • __init__.ts

      server side entry point of your VU mod

  • shared/

    common code shared with client/ and server/

• node_modules/

  The node dependencies. Here lives typescript and the lua transpiler. Don't touch

• rime-dump/

  This is a dump of Venice-EBX. I did not include it in vu-typescript-mod, but you might want to clone Venice-EBX yourself.

• typings/

  Auto-generated typescript typings from the latest VU docs

• package.json

  The typescript/nodejs part of your mod. Don't touch it unless you know what you're doing

• mod.json

  Your VU mod.json to describe your mod. Basically just some meta data

• tsconfig.json

  The typscript configuration file. Just don't touch it. It works

• vu-printer.ts

  Some utility to correctly translate typescript to lua that VU wants. It fixes imports and provides you with syntactic sugar!

• yarn.lock

  Locks the node dependencies form the package.json in place. Just don't touch it.

EBX Access (syntactic sugar!!!)

The following typescript code:

const jumpStateDataInstance = TSUtils.RetrieveEBXInstance<FB.JumpStateData>('Characters/Soldiers/DefaultSoldierPhysics');

will be translated at compile time to the following lua code:

local jumpStateDataInstance = ResourceManager:FindInstanceByGuid(
    Guid("235CD1DA-8B06-4A7F-94BE-D50DA2D077CE"),
    Guid("3129BCFE-000E-4001-9F8F-316E5835C9FC")
)

This feature requires that you have the rime-dump/ in place and up-to-date.

A full use case in typescript might look like this:

const jumpStateDataInstance = TSUtils.RetrieveEBXInstance<FB.JumpStateData>('Characters/Soldiers/DefaultSoldierPhysics');
if (!jumpStateDataInstance) {
    print(`jumpStateDataInstance not found`);
} else {
    print(`jumpStateDataInstance found`);
    const jumpStateData = new FB.JumpStateData(jumpStateDataInstance);
    jumpStateData.MakeWritable();
    jumpStateData.jumpHeight = 4;
}