Design/Runtime Plugins and Questions about them.

[nick.keane]

I'm developing a game of exteme secretism, and I'm thinking of making a particle system plugin that I can use in my next project, and every subsequent project after that as I so desire. However, I've never made a plugin before and my experience with DLLs is limited and, pardon the expression, rusty as shit. I'm going to try to work off of the AGS Visual C++ template provided, but in the meantime so I don't baffle myself, I have two questions that need answering. What should I be developing for, design time or run time? I want to have the particle system to just run based off of the classes I define and the functions I call from the DLL in my AGS scripts, not from a custom interface in the editor, so I'm assuming run-time is the focus, but the explaination of design time and run time is kind of ambiguous for this purpose, as the effects are felt in game (RT) but coded, modified, etc. in the editor (DT). Also, can custom classes be defined in the DLL and, if so, how do I inport them in code from the DLL. I've seen a few classes defined in the template but I am unsure as to if my own classes can be defined and exported with the AGS Engine recognizing them and allowing me to instantiate an instance of that class in code, since the classes defined were only standard to the engine.

The questions are probably self-explainatory and rhetorical, but still I have to be sure. Thanks to all who reply!

[Pumaman]

I'm not totally clear about what you mean by Design Time vs Run Time, but you'll certainly need to use the Native Code Plugins (ie. this API page), and NOT the Editor Plugin API.

You can expose classes to the script, but you need to script them as script structs in the header that you expose from the plugin.

If your C++ is rusty, don't try and do stuff with classes as your first step, just start with something simpler like a simple "TurnParticlesOn" method that the script can call, and go from there.