Spearhead

Hello and welcome to Spearhead!

If you're a developer that wants to contribute, look at the code or understand what we're doing, feel free to read on.

If you're a mission maker that wants to see the documentation and build you mission with this framework.
It's best to go to our fully fledged documentation website:

• Stable/Main: https://spearhead.rocks
• Beta/Develop: https://beta.spearhead.rocks

Project Structure

The Spearhead project is structured in a lot of separate files.
While Lua isn't specifically created for it, most of it has been written with the standards of OOP in mind.
Classes, Objects and helper methods.

You're find in the /src folder all the files.
They are separated in a somewhat logical order, but some things might feel out of place.

Bundling, Intellisense, Linting

In DCS the easiest way to import a script is with 1 single file, however, that's not as "maintainable". In order to keep it maintainable we're using a self-built tool to bundle, validate and rewrite some of the lua in order to get it into a single file. The tool is open-source here: https://git.dutchie031.com/dutchie031/DcsMissionScriptingTools.
It has a VSCode extensions and two Github Action steps.
If your favorite IDE isn't VSCode (I respect that), it might be very easy to create an extension for it, if it does allow that.

The VSCode extensions comes with Intellisense as well, in the form of a full file of DCS lua type annotations.
This gives the Lua Language Server by Sumneko (which can be used in VSCode) all the type definitions it needs. When writing Spearhead code it is also important to keep our own LuaLS Annotations up to date and complete.
Read all about those annotations here: https://luals.github.io/wiki/annotations/

When a pull-request to the develop or main branches is created, before it can be merged it requires to pass the linter checks. The first linting check is done by the Lua Language Server. It checks for whitespace and formatting, but it also checks if all types, type-checking and casts are in order. It marks unused variables etc. .luarc.json has all the config for those checks.
The second linter job is with luacheck which first "bundles" the script, and then runs a full linter check over the bundled script.
This is to make sure that also the bundled script does not contain any errors.

Contributing

Setting up the project

If you've kept on reading I assume you either want to brwose