Adding new functionality to NWNXEE

Bhaal · April 25, 2018, 1:42pm

Just a very very simple tutorial for beginners.

BhaalM/stuff/blob/master/simple_nwnxee_tutorial.md

# Objective 

The objective of this tutorial is to learn how to add basic functionality to NWNXEE. In order to do that I'll show you how to implement the very simple SetCorpseDecayTime function. After that, the best way to progress is to learn from the code of other plugins. 

# API

The API (the definition of the clases, structures, fucntions... that the game uses internally) is located in the directory NWNXLib/API/Linux/API (I'll focus on the Linux API only)

In order to implement the SetCorpseDecayTime function the first thing we need to know is how this time is stored in the API. At the beginning it can be hard to search something in this big bunch of files... but after a while you'll see their names are more than enough to know where to look. 

Since we are interested in a creature property we should start looking at files with "creature" in its name: the basic creature properties are defined in the file "CNWSCreature.hpp", its stats are defined in "CNWSCreatureStats.hpp", its appearance in CNWSCreatureAppearanceInfo.hpp... 

In our case, the CNWSCreature.hpp header defines the CNWSCreature structure, based on the more general CNWSObject. Basically all the creatures we encounter in a game are defined with this structure. If you look at the begining of its definition you'll see a field named "m_nDecayTime":

```C
struct CNWSCreature
    : CNWSObject
{
    int32_t m_bPonyRide;
    uint16_t m_nEquipArrayIndex;

This file has been truncated. show original

Regards