5.0 KiB
title, parent, nav_order
| title | parent | nav_order |
|---|---|---|
| Concepts | Advanced | 01 |
If you want to get deeper into Moose, you will encounter a few terms and concepts that we will explain here. You will need them for the later pages.
Git and GitHub
Moose has about 260.000 lines of code and the amount is increasing each week. To maintain such a big code base a vcs (version control system) is needed. Moose uses GitHub as developer platform to create, store, and manage the code. GitHub uses Git as version control system and provides additional functionality like access control, bug tracking, feature requests and much more.
As a Moose user you don't need to learn how to use Git. You can download the files on GitHub with a browser. But using Git will ease up the steps to keep the Moose version on your hard disk up to date.
You will need to interact with GitHub. At least to download the Moose files. For non developers the page can be confusing. Take your time and read this documentation. We are not able to explain every single detail on using GitHub and Git. Especially because it is changing really quick and this documentaion will not. So try to use the help system of GitHub or find some videos on YouTube. If you get stuck ask for help in the Moose Discord.
Moose uses more then one repository on GitHub which doesn't exactly make it any clearer. A list can be found on the reposities page.
Branches: master & develop
As already explained in the overview two branches are used:
As a starter it is okay to begin your journey with the master branch.
If you are interested in some newer classes you need to use the develop
branch. The later one is also very stable, but it's missing more detailed
documentation and example missions for some of the new OPS classes.
You can switch between these branches with a drop down in the upper left corner of th GitHub repository page. The list of branches is long. So it is a best practise to save a bookmark in your browser with the links above. Both branches are available on most of the different repositories. But because of a limitation of GitHub pages, we had to split the documentation in two different repositories:
- Documentation of
masterbranch: MOOSE_DOCS - Documentation of
developbranch: MOOSE_DOCS_DEVELOP
Build result vs. source files
Moose consists of more than 140 individual files with the file extension .lua.
They are places in a directory tree, which makes it more organized and its
semantic is pre-defined for IntelliSense to work.
On every change which is pushed to GitHub a build job will combine all of
these files to a single file called Moose.lua. In a second step all
comments will be removed to decrease the file size and the result will be saved
as Moose_.lua. These both files are created for users of Moose to include in
your missions.
The individual .lua files are used by the Mosse developers and power users.
It is complicated to use them, but in combination with an IDE and a debugger it
is very usefull to analyse even complex problems or write new additions to the
Moose framework.
Static loading vs. dynamic loading
If you add a script file with a DO SCRIPT FILE trigger, like we described in
[Create your own Hello world], the script file will be copied into the mission
file. This mission file (file extension .MIZ) is only a compressed ZIP archive
with another file ending.
If you change the script file after adding it to the mission, the changes are not available on mission start. You have to re-add the script after each change. This can be very annoying and often leads to forgetting to add the change again. Then you wonder why the script does not deliver the desired result.
But when the mission is finished you can upload it to your dedicated DCS server
or give it to a friend and it should run without problems. This way of embedding
the scripts do we call static loading and the resulting mission is very
portable.
The other way on loading scripts is by using DO SCRIPT. This time the mission
editor don't show a file browse button. Instead you see a (very small) text
field to enter the code directly into it. It is only usefull for very small
script snippets. But we can use it to load a file from our hard drive like this:
aaa