TOOL: AGS Toolbox🧰 0.4.0

[eri0o]

AGS Toolbox🧰 version 0.4.0

Get Latest Release agstoolbox.exe | companion atbx.exe | GitHub Repo



Hi, I made something intended for those that deal with multiple versions of AGS Editors and multiple AGS Game Projects. Place the agstoolbox.exe in a folder under your user, like "C:\Users\MY_USER\software", before you run it.



After you run the agstoolbox.exe, you will find a bluecup in your indicator area of your taskbar, near the clock area. Double click or right click it, to open the main panel.

Features

• Editors that you install using AGS Toolbox are called Managed Editors, as they are managed through the tool. Just double click in any Editor available to Download to get one.
• Editors you have acquired through other means (like installed through Chocolatey), are called Externally Installed Editors, directories to look for can be configured in the Settings.
• Game Projects are looked for in directories set in the Settings. It will understand the Editor Version it was used to create, open in it by simply double clicking. You can also use right click to open in a different version.
• You can add it to your Windows initialization if you want a quick shortcut to AGS game development (it's in the settings menu)

Right clicking any item on the list will show available actions, double clicking will execute the command marked in bold.

I made it initially for myself to help handle my own games and modules. It will, in future, have an additional pair tool, that will provide the same functionalities through a command line interface - intended for CI and automation.

For people in Unity, this may be a similar AGS version of the Unity Hub. I actually modeled it on the JetBrains Toolbox, which I use to manage different versions of CLion, Android Studio and PyCharm - it's also developed in PyCharm!

Command Line Usage

NOTE: On Windows, due to OS and PyInstaller limitations, agstoolbox.exe doesn't work with command line arguments, so atbx.exe is for exclusive command line usage.

Code: bash

$ atbx --help
usage: atbx [-h] [-s {bash,zsh,tcsh}] [-v] {list,install,open,build,settings} ...

agstoolbox is an application to help manage AGS Editor versions.

positional arguments:
  {list,install,open,build,settings}
                        command
    list                lists things
    install            install tools
    open                open an editor or project
    build              build an ags project
    settings            modify or show settings

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -s {bash,zsh,tcsh}    print shell completion script
  -v, --version        get software version.

Copyright 2023 Erico Vieira Porto, MIT.

As an example, a command line to force install the latest 3.6 AGS Editor, as a managed Editor is as follows

Code: bash

$ atbx install editor 3.6 -f
Will install managed AGS Editor release 3.6.0.47
 Downloading... 40475597/40475597 B |████████████████████████████████| AGS-3.6.0.47.zip
Extracting...
Installed release 3.6.0.47

The command line interface is working, but it is still quite limited, if you have more needs for it, please ask me!

Tab completion is also provided, the script for it can be generated with -s parameter, if you need help setting up just ask.


Experimentally, AGS Toolbox is also available on PyPI. Prefer the exe releases above for now, the PyPI releases are intended for uses of it's core parts and the atbx command line utility in a future continuous integration tool.


AGS Toolbox is written in Python, so if you are interested in a new feature and want to contribute code, just ask me and I can explain the basics of it.

[Tarnos12]

Looks great! I've been using multiple ags versions lately and this will definitely help.
The fact that it knows which version the project used is great.

I will try it out later today, thanks.

[eri0o]

Awesome! Let me know how it goes! Any ideas of things to add feel free to add here.

When I started, I wrote the features I had in mind to pursue, but of course I expect these and priorities can be adjusted as other people use it: https://github.com/ericoporto/agstoolbox#desired-features

A warn, I have not tested with AGS 4, because it has no releases so far, I have no idea what will happen.

[Tarnos12]

Awesome! Let me know how it goes! Any ideas of things to add feel free to add here.

When I started, I wrote the features I had in mind to pursue, but of course I expect these and priorities can be adjusted as other people use it: https://github.com/ericoporto/agstoolbox#desired-features

A warn, I have not tested with AGS 4, because it has no releases so far, I have no idea what will happen.

Ah I use 4.0 too, will test after making a backup.

[eri0o]

Really minor release fixing a crash that happened when the Editor version was too short - happened with Editor 3.4.3.

Working on additional things now.

[eri0o]

Added a new 0.2.0 release

• running it a second time raises the AGS Toolbox window instead of opening a second instance
• added a setting to add itself to the Windows startup (it doesn't work on other OSes yet)

Note: if you use the startup with windows setting, I recommend to move the agstoolbox.exe file to a suitable place. I maintain my portable binaries under a directory I created in "C:\Users\MY_USER\software", if someone has a suggestion for a non-ProgramFiles location, mention yours.

Edit: Well, seconds after I realized I wasn't able to fetch 3.6.0 Release with this, and had to hack a better way to detect the AGS Release assets, so now it's a 0.2.1 release

Edit2: Minor adjustments to try to silently recover from invalid settings. Not sure it's enough yet.

Edit3: From 0.2.3 and onwards, right clicking on it on Explore you will be able to read which agstoolbox version you have.

[eri0o]

Hey, 0.4.0 version of agstoolbox.exe adds a small search bar! Not much you can do in it yet, but it's useful for filtering stuff!



Also check past improvements in the command line version atbx.exe.