My friends and have a quite interesting way to turn cooperative video games into semi-competative experiences that also enables us to play games that have fewer players than the number in our group, without letting anyone feel left out. Recently I programmed a plugin for my Sansa to act as a "scoreboard" for this setup, which uses data from an external text file to figure out the specifications for a particular video game:
- available characters
-maximum number of "active" players (ones controlling an actual character)
- maximum number of "passive" players (ones along the lines of SMG's "Co-Star" Luma or NSMBU's "Boost Mode"
- whether the passive players are assigned to particular active players
- whether the game allows for "bubbling"
- whether the game has its own quasi-competative aspect like SM3DW's crown mechanic
- whether the game switches characters when a player dies (like the Subspace Emmisary)
- etc.
An additional text file tells the scoreboard the names of the people playing and which game they're playing, and it saves the scores to a third text file and can retrieve that data. But the most important of the three text files to my question is the one described above. I'd like to write a second pluging that creates a new text file for a new game, so endusers can create their own game-settings and I can still be sure that the table in the text files is formatted correctly. But in order to do that properly, I need a way to invoke the text-editor within LUA, so endusers can input characters' names and the name of the game itself.