Wirebox roadmap.

[VigilanteHobo]

What are some of the milestones to strive for in the future of this project?

[Nebual]

My initial aim is to build a similar featureset as Gmod's Wiremod, so most of the same gates, input devices (thrusters/lights/screens/grabber/hydraulics/spawner/etc), output devices (buttons/gps/gyro/detector/ranger), etc. I'm personally not looking to write an Expression3, but I figure at some point someone'll make something along those lines (Starfall is making some progress). At the moment, there's so few examples in base S&box (eg. what is a vehicle? Tool UI? addons? networking vars?) I'm going rather slowly as I discover good patterns.

Some goals:

• Stay modular: Minimize changes to the 'base' sandbox gamemode; I've been working on a [sandbox-plus]https://github.com/Nebual/sandbox-plus) gamemode thats close to vanilla + some extra hooks to facilitate this
• Streamline use: I'm exploring making the Wiring tool a bit more all-inclusive, like embedding the debugger (showing current input/output values of moused over devices) and creating Gates by holding G to access a quick spawn menu of them.
• Mixing types: I also like the idea of replacing some conversion gates by just allowing type-mixing, like "Button.Pressed (bool) -> MultiplyGate.A, Vector Direction -> MultiplyGate.B, ConstantValue of 5 -> MultiplyGate.C": the bool gets cast automatically to a vector(1,1,1), the integer 5 becomes vector(5,5,5), and then all 3 get multiplied, so you effectively get a 5x direction vector with the button is pushed, 0,0,0 when its off.

So I guess some milestones:

1. Can wire a light to a button (done!)
2. Can wire together a thruster-powered flying car with gyro stabilizers (done!)
3. Has all gates implemented
4. Has a stable enough interface/addon system (and is popular enough) that a third party addon (eg. Stargate, (sbox-voxel)[https://github.com/TankNut/sbox-voxel]) can add Wiring support to their ents
5. Has most of the Gmod Wiremod entities implemented
6. Has new Source2/Sbox exclusive entities, like a fancy Particle Emitter, dynamic mesh building, voxel printing, etc

I'm happy to review PR's if anyone wants to help! Wiremod's always been a community/open-source-led project :D

[Robadob]

Got access to S&box beta this week, happy to help out. But I've not touched the wire source before, so may need some directions of where to start.