The release of dm.exe was truly exciting (it allows for 3rd-party DM IDEs, which I know at least a couple of us have already started on---the very reason behind this post). While working on my own IDE, I thought how redundant it will have to be to implement certain functionality that the compiler could certainly take care of for me. An example of this might be the object tree:

Now, I could parse the code manually (and boy what a headache that might turn out to be), or even the code tree generated by dm.exe, to retrieve a node list for the project. But, being the practical (read: lazy) developer that I am, I'd hate to reinvent the wheel for this; it would be perfect if dm.exe could output the object tree for me. An example command might look like this (note that I've excluded some details that might be included in an actual call, such as paths to the dm.exe and some.dme):

dm.exe -o some.dme
loading some.dme
saving some.dmb

Nodes:
/mob [file.dm:1]
/mob/blah [file.dm:32]
/obj [otherfile.dm:1]
[...]

Now, this alone would be a very useful addition, but it could certainly get better! For example, take the 'Show all nodes' option in Dream Maker. We might have something like this:

dm.exe -o -a some.dme
loading some.dme
saving some.dmb

Nodes:
/mob [file.dm:1]
/mob/New [file.dm:2]
[...]

That would indeed boost dm.exe's functionality greatly as well, but you better believe it could get better! For example, the ability to distinguish between object nodes, proc nodes, and variable nodes would be another nice feature:

dm.exe -o -a some.dme
loading some.dme
saving some.dmb

Nodes:
/mob [file.dm:1] /o
/mob/var [file.dm:2] /x
/mob/var/someVar [file.dm:2] /v
/mob/New [file.dm:3] /p
[...]

Now, that's not terribly useful in cases that '/var' or '/proc' is actually included in the node path, but as can be seen in my example (with /mob/New), some are a little less obvious, making this little addition rather useful. Now, another nicety would be if we could (as seen in the previous example) combine options to compile with. This way we could pull out all kinds of information with dm.exe without needing to recompile a bunch:

dm.exe -l -o -a some.dme
loading some.dme
saving some.dmb

Source Files:
file.dm
[...]

Nodes:
/mob [file.dm:1] /o
[...]


Currently I don't think it works with more than one command-line option.

If we could get these in (I don't imagine they should be much trouble, since the functionality already exists on the back-end), it would really be awesome, and would probably save all 3rd-party IDE developers a nice little headache, because all reasonable IDEs surely need a pretty little Object Tree! =)

Now, moving on from the object tree idea (what, you didn't think I was done did you?!), there is something more I sure wouldn't mind being added: the ability to package files with dm.exe. Call me greedy, but I think that this could be useful in dm.exe as well; it's a rather important feature in Dream Maker, and I think it would be useful here as well.

Anyways, thanks for taking the time to sift through my ideas! Surely anything that gets implemented here should help out some of us lazy developer-types. :)

Hiead