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What programming languages must you learn to make 3rd party editors? Like I noticed some are PHP, while others are C and VisualBasic I think. Can other types be made?

This is the modding forum but... You can make a program in alot of languages from C++ to VB aswell as alot of others it depends what you want to do it with but most people use C++

Up, up and away!

>>Computers & Technical

It really definitely depends on what you are doing. If you're doing something simple, like a TBL editor, you could definitely stick with a basic language like VB. If you're doing a dat editor like DatEdit, you definitely need to delve into complex C and possibly Visual C. I can't help but say that if you're asking this, then you likely have little experiencing programming and thus would find it nearly impossible to surpass the available modding tools...

EDIT:
Arg you moved this topic right as I was posting in it...
"Some required files could not be found..."

Actually, C or C++ would be more ideal for a TBL editor, since more processing needs to be done than just simple parsing of the data and using C/C++ instead of VB would be able to make it faster. VB would be just fine for a dat file editor.

You can technically use any language than can read/write files.

However if you arn't experienced in a language, don't just throw yourself at making an editor. It wont go to well. Currently i'm having fun trying to write my own editor for decrypting the block table in MPQ's based off of stormlib in C#. So far I've just copied and pasted most of the code(I love how well you can port code from C++ to C#).
While i've used sfmpqapi and stormlib for opening them..I think there should be an open source .NET one.

Heh, I had actually started a C# mpq library. I have the decryption and loading of the hash and block tables all set up, but decompression/compression will be the hardest part.

Porting the decompression/compression libraries would take a lot time. There have been some already ported to C#.
Zlib: http://www.componentace.com/ZLIB.NET
Huffman: http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/Huffman_algorithm.asp
Bzip: http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/Shar...ib/Default.aspx
Missing pkzip and there should be plenty of things for wave. These would at least get some of the more hectic parts of the porting out of the way.

I've been looking at Stormlibs code and asked SI a few questions although i've figured them out myself. Hey if you could give me any code....it would be extremely helpful. I'll even give you a cookie.

At least the ones other than Zlib and Bzip would need to be ported, most likely. Zlib and Bzip are probably the largest ones out of the five, in terms of the size of the code.