License clarification

[Urbs97]

Hi, I'd like to use sslc in my project. The source files have BSD 2-Clause headers from mcpp, but there's no LICENSE file in the repo and the CMakeLists.txt metadata says "UNLICENSED".

Would you be open to adding a LICENSE file to clarify the terms for the sslc-specific code? Or could you confirm that it's fine to use/redistribute?

Thanks for maintaining this tool.

[phobos2077]

If you care about license, I'm not sure any of the maintainers can really answer this. This is based on some ancient code released for a different game (Star Trek Klingon Academy IIRC) and then modified to support FO2 (by adding the necessary opcodes) before it was expanded again as part of sfall modderspack. Not even sure about the license of that original released source code.

So if you're interested about such things, you can do your own research on this topic. So far sslc was just used as-is for modding purposes only.

What's your project?

[Urbs97]

Thanks for the background information. I assumed the project was created through reverse engineering which would've made licensing easier.

I'm working on a LSP adapter so the parser can be used with most editors like NeoVim. And I would also use the tool for a pipeline to assemble my scripts so I don't need to do it manually and have to check in the .int files.
Since both is for just modding the game and I'm not selling anything it should be fine.

[phobos2077]

Btw, did you know about https://github.com/BGforgeNet/VScode-BGforge-MLS ?

Also there's Sfall Script Editor - it's the only tool (that I know of) that actually parses the script before compilation and provides proper symbol usages, syntax errors etc. MLS instead relies on regular expressions and custom JS code to parse scripts (instead of actually using SSL). I think there were some plans for integrating proper parser but the project isn't developed actively AFAIK.

As for not checking in .int files - I (and other modders) solved that already with custom pipelines that just use sslc and some C preprocessor as executables. Don't need anything more fancy than that. See example in my EcCo repo.

If you want to develop alternative to MLS what would be a game changer is the proper parsing. Either via the parser.dll (one of the build targets of sslc) that uses an old-school binary DLL interface, or by some other way using sslc actual code (in combination with a preprocessor of course). Proper navigation between procedures, jumping to definitions, etc. Basically what Sfall Script Editor has but in a modern UI.

[Urbs97]

Yes I know about MLS. My goal is a non-web native alternative that is not coupled to VSCode.
I have modified sslc to be also build as a linux library (.so) with c exports. I have pushed it to an branch in my fork, it's work in progress though.

I hope to be able use NeoVim with the same feature set as the Sfall Script Editor. Others will also be able to use any JetBrains IDE, Emacs, Sublime, Zed and what else there is out there.

And thanks for the tip with the pipeline. Using a C preprocessor will be a good start.