Tea Framework
Tea Framework (hereby Tea) is a progressive modding framework for tModLoader.
Tea provides numerous utilities for modders to use, and heavily reduces boilerplate.
Why the Name?
Stemming from a joke about the naming convention of Terraria-related projects (see: tShock, tModLoader, tConfig, tAPI), Tea was originally envisioned as several projects. When I was first learning assembly loading, I decided to "port" a super-old version of tModLoader to 1.4 (rest assured, it never got far). After this, I later contemplated using the name for a sort of "competitive mod loader" (think Forge vs. Fabric (and Quilt as well..., I guess)). We came to the conclusion that Tea, as a concept, worked better as a tModLoader mod that offered an expanded featureset.
Tea works off of two libraries, TomatoLib by myself and pboneLib by pbone.
Features
Tea is still under heavy development. We have designed Tea in such a way that allows us to create base interfaces for all features of the library. This allows users to freely implement their own dependencies instead of using our default ones. We have purposefully designed Tea to center around the Terraria.ModLoader.Mod class (we expect you to use TeaFramework.TeaMod, which extends Terraria.ModLoader.Mod and implements ITeaMod and IPatchRepository), though you may freely implement every interface aside from TeaMod elsewhere.
Outlined below is a list of currently-implemented features, as well as our goals moving forward:
- A fully-featured reflection library built in.
- Features caching (likely made redundant by the modern CLR...) as well as easy access to members through the elimenation of
BindingFlagboilerplate. - Dynamic method generation for quickly accessing private fields and properties (a modified and expanded system developed by absoluteAquarian).
- Features caching (likely made redundant by the modern CLR...) as well as easy access to members through the elimenation of
- An expanded patching API for easily modifying compiled IL at runtime.
- This is a sort of "wrapper" around MonoMod, which is already supplied by tModLoader.
- Patches are delegate-based and use autoloading for convenience.
- Isolated to an
IPatchRepository, mostly decoupling it fromTerraria.ModLoader.Mod.
- A redone loading system, working with steps (represented as
ILoadStep).- Eliminates
Terraria.ModLoader.Mod.Load()andTerraria.ModLoader.Mod.Unload()inTeaMod, but the default load steps still load it.- If you really want to, you can still use these in custom implementations of
ITeaMod.
- If you really want to, you can still use these in custom implementations of
- Eliminates
Documentation
Tea has summaries for most important types and members. You can view elaboratory articles and guides here.