Testing your Plugin

Note: In this section, we'll be making the following assumptions:

Plugin name: "Tutorial Plugin"

Plugin ID: "com.tutorial.plugin"

DLL Name: "tutorial-plugin.dll"

Now that you have a basic plugin, we want to make sure we can load it into Exanima.

Compiling your plugin

To build your plugin for testing, just run cargo build. It might take a while to compile first-time, or after changing dependencies.

Once it's complete, your plugin should be available in ./target/debug/tutorial_plugin.dll. Note that rust always replaces hyphens (-) with underscores (_) when compiling. We usually use hyphens in our dll names, so for example, when we copy tutorial_plugin.dll into the Exanima mods folder, we usually rename it to tutorial-plugin.dll.

You don't have to use hyphens though, so if you'd rather keep the underscore, just make sure you update the executable value in your config.toml to match the dll name:

executable = "tutorial_plugin.dll"

Loading your plugin into Exanima

In your Exanima game folder (The folder containing Exanima.exe), create a mods folder (if it doesn't already exist), and inside there, create a folder with your plugin name (e.g. tutorial-plugin)

Copy ./target/debug/tutorial_plugin.dll into C:/path/to/steamapps/common/Exanima/mods/tutorial-plugin/tutorial-plugin.dll

Copy ./config.toml into C:/path/to/steamapps/common/Exanima/mods/tutorial-plugin/config.toml

Now if you run EMTK, your plugin should be loaded. You can use the F2 key to toggle the in-game overlay, where you can enable/disable your plugin. As you enable & disable the plugin, you will see the logs in the EMTK console.