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Contributing

Setting up the development environment

  1. Clone the repository from GitHub.

  2. Install HEMTT:

    winget install hemtt

  3. Build the mod with hemtt build, or validate it without building via hemtt check.

  4. hemtt launch starts Arma 3 with the mod. The test range mission .hemtt/missions/itc_land_vr_test.VR has a station for every system and a control board for teleports, scenarios and diagnostics.

Coding guidelines

This mod follows the same coding guidelines as the ACE3 mod — naming conventions, function headers, bracket/spacing style, and the general avoidance of scheduled space (spawn/execVM) and magic numbers.

  • User-facing text goes in the addon's stringtable.xml (CSTRING in configs, LLSTRING in scripts). Run hemtt ln sort after adding keys.
  • Never put macros inside quoted strings, the preprocessor does not expand them there; use QUOTE(...) or the Q-prefixed macros.

Validating changes

Before opening a PR, run:

hemtt check
python tools/stringtable_validator.py
python tools/config_style_checker.py
python tools/macro_in_string_checker.py

These mirror the checks run in CI (.github/workflows/check.yml and validate.yml). Lint severities are set in .hemtt/lints.toml.

Translations

All player-facing text is in the stringtable.xml of each addon. Only English exists so far; add your language as a new element next to <English> in every key.

Documentation

The documentation is built with Zensical from the docs folder:

pip install -r docs/requirements.txt
zensical serve

Pushes to master that change the docs publish them to GitHub Pages (.github/workflows/docs.yml). Add a new vehicle or item with its classname to the page of its system in docs/systems/, and new config for modders to Mission Makers & Modders.

The open work list is docs/TODO.md; it is kept out of the published site.