Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a lightweight code and config editor. Featuring an integrated project folder browser and a simple but powerful interface, it is one of the best tools for developing HPL2 mods (for HPL3 it works well too, but CodeLite might be a better option).

While VS Code is open-source, its releases still contain Microsoft's telemetry and tracking. VSCodium is a "clean" version without those elements. It is functionally identical to VS Code.

HPL2

• Check out the built-in tutorial and the online tutorial. Some particularly useful features are:
  • Ctrl+Shift+F to search text in the entire project folder
  • Alt+Up/Down arrows to move lines of code
  • Ctrl+Shift+Alt+Up/Down to copy lines of code
  • Built-in git version control interface (if you already have git installed). This is one of the more convenient ways of using git. Read more about version control here and more about git in VS Code here.
• Open your mod folder.
• Add highlighting for HPL2 file types; Open the settings menu (Ctrl+,) and search "file associations". You can do this in the User tab (global) or the Workspace tab (will only apply to this project folder). Then add:
  • *.hps with a value of cpp
  • *.lang with a value of xml
  • *.cfg with a value of xml
  • You can also add associations for other HPL files, such as: .ent, .dae, .snt and so on. Pretty much all files in HPL2 use XML.
  • This will also add auto-completion for various things (like function names) that have been written anywhere else in the project.

Unlike HPL3, using a C++ extension will make things worse for you, as HPL2's style of scripting is not fully compatible with C++ standards (mainly; built-in functions don't have to and can't be included, and the &in &out syntax). There do exist a few AngelScript plugins for VS Code, but none of them are suitable (and several of them are abandoned). As such, there is no good way of adding hints for built-in HPL2 script functions at the moment.

HPL3

Main article: Setting up Visual Studio Code