Trying to get workflow to mod, any idea of how can I access files on my pc?

[Zombie_Mushroom]

Hi Zomboid-community, how are you doing?

 

So, long story short, I am trying to start woking on different mod ideas for zomboid, but I want to modify my local zomboid instance to make programming easier.

Sadly, I have a very ugly "shotgun debugging" approach to code-writting, which does not work well with a game that takes 1 or 2 minutes to load.

 

My idea was simply to reload a mod when I made some modifications and see how they modify my Zomboid instance.

I can do that by hand, but it's an arguably time-consuming process if I want to do it each time I change 2 or 3 lines.

 

So I have 2 questions:

 

1.  Does anybody now how I can load/reload a mod (from code)?
2. Do we have any way to explore a computer directories from inside the LUA code?

 

I have already tried to do both with no luck.  

 

Thank you for all the help!

[Zombie_Mushroom]

So, by lurking online a bit I think I found the main source of my problem.

 

Apparently zomboid interpreter of LUA (which is done inside JAVA via a virtual machine) is called KAHLUA, which explicitly exclude things like the "io" library.

 

Does anybody how to either access JAVA's file-management from KAHLUA or if there are any other workarounds for this?

 

I imagine that it would be possible to replace the java files and include there an auto-mod reloader, but I would like to avoid touching the java code as much as possible, since that's a very "version specific" solution.

[excon]

if you want your changes visible in game after you made edits:

3d models change during run time 

lua and txt need to reimported i have not found a way to do that during game runtime

 

untill then you can do it from the main  menu at least in debug mode bottom right is a reload lua button 

there is also a mod to reload lua 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 1, 2023 by excon