Developer Guide

AceVortex is fully open-source! You can see the full code for the extension (including these docs) on GitHub. Community contributions, fixes and PRs are all welcome! That being said, please read the info below to make all of our lives a bit easier.

Licensing

AceVortex is made available under an MIT License. That means all contributions will also be licensed under the MIT License and all the conditions and limitations that involves.

Development Environment

To work with the AceVortex code, you’ll only need Node.js (including a recent version of npm) and TypeScript installed. Development so far has been done in Visual Studio Code, but any IDE that supports TypeScript should work just fine.

Getting set up

Whether you are developing on the same machine that AC7 and Vortex are installed on or not, the easiest way I have found to work with this has been to install AceVortex manually, then whenever I make a change simply drop my rebuilt index.js into the game-acecombat7skiesunknown folder and restart Vortex.

You can find Diagnostics Logs in the overflow menu at the top right of the Vortex window. There is also a Vortex extension that lets you open the DevTools window.

Continuous Integration

Note that all commits to, and pull requests against, the master branch are automatically built as part of a GitHub Action. Please don’t add unnecessary changes to the Actions workflow without prior discussion.

Feature Requests

AceVortex is a community project, currently built and maintained by a single non-developer. As such, feature requests will be accepted, but I can’t provide any level of assurance that any requests will certainly be included. Also remember that we are limited to features that Vortex can reasonably support. Open an issue on GitHub to discuss viability of any requests.

A note on confusing code

For anyone who decides to wade into the AceVortex code, there’s a few things worth remembering:

1. I’m not a developer: This is just something I’m doing in my spare time, so don’t expect super-high-quality code. I’ll happily take fixes, though!
2. Working with Vortex is weird: There’s quite a few quirks of the codebase that exist because of unfathomably mystifying behaviour in Vortex’s extension API.
3. There are definitely missing edge cases: This started out as a basic prototype, so error handling and edge cases are definitely not at the standard we’d like.
4. AC7 mods are almost always packaged weirdly: An unfortunate confluence in how AC7 handles mods/skins and how Vortex expects things to work means we’re having to wrangle a lot of things.