treehouse/content/programming/projects/stitchkit.tree

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- [repo][def:stitchkit/repo]

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- a heartwarmingly joyful to use modding toolkit for A Hat in Time

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+ ### philosophy

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    + better than vanilla

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        - the experience of using Stitchkit should always be more pleasant than the vanilla modding tools

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            - if it's somehow worse, that's a bug

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    + fix the problems, don't fear breakage

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        - applies to [MuScript][branch:programming/projects/muscript] in particular - we are not afraid to make the language better, even if it breaks your code

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    + if it ain't broke, don't fix it

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        - while fixing issues is important, we want the modding tools to remain familiar to existing vanilla users.

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            - for example the syntax of UnrealScript may be a bit dated, but it is perfectly readable without much reason to change it. no need to invent a new language.

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    + be helpful

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        - people who come to mod AHiT are often not professional programmers to put up with shitty tools that have overly cryptic error messages and terrible user experience across the board.

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        - we want to help people fuel their imagination instead of hindering it

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    + be lazy

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        - don't do work nobody asks for

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            - compiling things the user doesn't care about is a pointless waste of computer resources

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            - implementing things that don't matter for Hat modding is a pointless waste of time

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+ ### insanium

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    - section for absolutely insane ideas that will never work but fill my inner hackerman with joy

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        - organized from least insane to most insane

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    - also see [MuScript's insanium][branch:01HA4KNTTGG3YX2GYFQ89M2V6Q]

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    + hot reloading scripts in the editor

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        - in theory if we control the editor process, we should be able to search the address space for various anchor points

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            + scripts can be up to 65536 bytes long - this might not seem like much, but bytecode is much more compact than text!

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                - from my analyses when building [Yarnbox][branch:programming/projects/yarnbox], most chunks of bytecode don't exceed 4096 bytes

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            + the engine loads your bytecode _mostly_ verbatim, so we could include a recognizable signature at the end of every script

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                - I imagine we could use a short string of bytes that's unlikely to collide with anything yet fast to search for. probably 16 bytes (128 bits) would be enough but we can experiment
                with less

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                - I say it loads your code _mostly_ verbatim because it actually parses the bytecode to translate archive object indices to

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            - since we can't reallocate memory, we'll have to always preallocate all 65536 bytes - but 64 KiB isn't that much in the first place,

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                - well not until you realize how many functions there are in the engine (I haven't counted.) but you can't modify those so no need to support this functionality there

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                - and the typical mod doesn't have that many functions (what, 200 maybe? that would be ~12.5 MiB of memory, which ain't much)

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        - with the bytecode of the script found in memory, we can modify it arbitrarily however we want

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            - except it's not that simple because scripts contain object references, and we have no way to resolve those to addresses

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                - we could use `DynamicLoadObject` though, as cursed as that is :thinking:

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        - the downside of this is that we could only modify the bytecode of functions.

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            - I imagine there could be some hacks we could do to trigger running arbitrary code inside the context of the editor, but I haven't thought those through yet fully