MOOSE/docs/advanced/basics.md
2024-02-15 16:47:43 +01:00

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Basics 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 Git, a distributed source code management system created 2005 by Linus Torvalds for the development of the Linux kernel.

As developer platform GitHub was choosen as a central place for Moose to create, store, and manage the code. GitHub use 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 uns 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:

  • master: Stable release branch.
  • develop: Newest development with more OPS classes.

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.

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.

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 the single file called Moose.lua. In a seconds 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

IDE vs. Notepad++

What is a debugger (good for)