AGS Toolbox 🧰

Utility Adventure Game Studio software to help manage, install, and uninstall different AGS Editor versions

For usability information and questions, go to the ags forums topic.

inspired by JetBrains Toolbox, but different

This software is Windows only - since AGS Editor is Windows only. This may change in the future - compatibility is kept with macOS and Linux, but functionality may be absent.

Installation

You should use the agstoolbox.exe from latest release. Place it in a directory under your user like C:\Users\MY_USER\software\agstoolbox.exe and double click it.

Installing from pip

You can install it from pip

pip install agstoolbox

NOTE: On MS Windows, instalation from pip may not work correctly, see Warning on Windows Store Python for more information.

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 made available to for command line arguments.

$ 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

$ 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

tab completion on Windows Git-Bash

Check if you have a ~/.bashrc file, attempt to show it

cat ~/.bashrc

If you get an error message, you don't have one yet, lets generate one

cat  /etc/bash.bashrc > ~/.bashrc

We are going to create a directory to store additional bash completion in your Windows user home, and then use atbx to generate the bash completion script and then add a line to bashrc to load it once a new shell loads.

mkdir ~/bash_completion.d/
atbx -s bash > ~/bash_completion.d/atbx
echo "source ~/bash_completion.d/atbx" >> ~/.bashrc

Once you close and reload the terminal, using atbx and pressing tab should show the commands, like list, install, ...

Whenever you update atbx, regenerate it's completion script using

atbx -s bash > ~/bash_completion.d/atbx

Development

Building a portable EXE

Install pyinstaller (pip install pyinstaller) and then use it on a cmd.exe prompt

pyinstaller agstoolbox.spec

This should generate a agstoolbox.exe file under the dist/ directory in the project root.

Coding

PyCharm Community is highly recommended for development, you can setup a venv and have it install dependencies and running the project as soon as you point to the root directory. Be sure to set agstoolbox as the command to run in it.

This project uses Python 3, I am currently developing with 3.9, because it provides compatibility with additional type information that is not supported out of the box in previous versions. For now it's been possible to use future imports to keep this type annotation compatible with Python 3.8.

Use pip to install dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

For running, you can call the script on the rootfolder directly.

python agstoolbox

You can do the same with stbx

python atbx

You can configure your IDE to run both of these scripts and alternate between them when debugging.

Warning on Windows Store Python

If you are using Python from Windows Store, most writes to AppData/Local and similar will be redirected and you will not be able to properly use or debug AGS Toolbox, I recomend you use a Win32 Python to avoid debugging frustrations.

There's probably ways to break the redirection from MS Windows Store Python, but we need to look carefully to not break cross os compatibility, so we may need to diverge Windows vs Nix, see python/cpython#85368

Author and License

This code is made by Érico Porto, and licensed with MIT LICENSE.