JContainers (64-bit)

A project to extend Skyrim's Papyrus scripting with JSON formatted serializable data structures.

Important

This project is fork of the original JContainers. It strives to convert and mash it up to the new Skyrim Special 64-bit edition. Cudos to the original author and all of his supporters!

Why?

If you are programmer, sooner or later you'll notice the lack of many useful features in Papyrus. There is no way to:

• Append or erase values from arrays
• Put an array into an array (i.e. no nested arrays)
• Put multiple value types into a single array
• Have associative containers
• Be able to load or save a data into a file

Solution

Since there is no source code of the Papyrus virtual machine, it is tricky and no easy to extend the existing Papyrus Array type or add new data structure types. JContainers implements from scratch its own data structures, garbage collector and other infernals. Features offered:

• Data structures: arrays and associative containers (a.k.a. maps or dictionaries)
• Import and export data to and from JSON files
• Embedded, lightweight scripting with Lua
• Interaction with JContainers via C++ interface.

Full documentation

Latest documentation

Can I help?

Sure! Feel free to do whatever you think is good - post feature requests, report bugs, improve Wiki or source code.

Building from source

Prerequisites

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition with Visual C++ support would suffice. All project files are of that version, but with a bit of manual work they may be converted to older versions too (e.g. 2013, though issues most certainly will arrise).
• A Python environment for Windows, version 3.4 or later. This is needed to run some helper scripts for testing, building distributions and any other small helpful tasks. Its python.exe should be available on the PATH variable.
• The GIT revisioning system and/or GitHub account may help if you want to contribute or work more easily with the public repository of this project.

First time setup

1. Run git submodule update --init --recursive so that all dependencies like Jannson, Google Test and etc. get downloaded and linked to the correct revisions.
2. Run the JContainer's tools\build_boost.bat file. It should manage to download, unpack, bootstrap and build the neccessary libraries from Boost (version 1.67 currently). If you encounter boost linking errors later on, you can attempt to specify the msvc version when running the batch file, e.g. tools\build_boost.bat vc141.
3. Run also the tools\merge_skse.bat file. It should extract the stripped down and bundled SKSE64 and SKSE VR distributions into the local source tree.
4. Open the JContainers.sln file with Visual Studio and Rebuild the whole solution. It will take some time.
5. After successfull build, run from the command line python tools\install.py x64\Release 64. Eventually swap Release for Debug - depending on what kind of distribution was build and actually is wanted in the dist\ folder. The last argument, 64 could be also VR, but then the configuration should be either ReleaseVR or DebugVR.
6. Optionaly, run python tools\test.py x64\Release\Data\SKSE\Plugins\JContainers64.dll. Again it depends whether Release or Debug (or ReleaseVR and DebugVR) builds should be tested. Note however that step 4, must be ran first!

That's it!