Currently, the most direct way to use the library is to write a script or plugin that can be loaded by it.
All the plugins can be found in the 'plugins' folder. There's no in-depth documentation
on how to write one yet, but it should be easy enough to copy one and just follow the pattern.
Other than through plugins, it is possible to use DFHack via remote access interface, or by writing Lua scripts.
The most important parts of DFHack are the Core, Console, Modules and Plugins.
* Core acts as the centerpiece of DFHack - it acts as a filter between DF and SDL and synchronizes the various plugins with DF.
* Console is a thread-safe console that can be used to invoke commands exported by Plugins.
* Modules actually describe the way to access information in DF's memory. You can get them from the Core. Most modules are split into two parts: high-level and low-level. High-level is mostly method calls, low-level publicly visible pointers to DF's data structures.
* Plugins are the tools that use all the other stuff to make things happen. A plugin can have a list of commands that it exports and an onupdate function that will be called each DF game tick.
Rudimentary API documentation can be built using doxygen (see build options with ``ccmake`` or ``cmake-gui``).
DFHack consists of variously licensed code, but invariably weak copyleft.
The main license is zlib/libpng, some bits are MIT licensed, and some are BSD licensed.
Feel free to add your own extensions and plugins. Contributing back to
the dfhack repository is welcome and the right thing to do :)
DF data structure definitions
-----------------------------
DFHack uses information about the game data structures, represented via xml files in the library/xml/ submodule.
See https://github.com/DFHack/df-structures
Data structure layouts are described in files following the df.\*.xml name pattern. This information is transformed by a perl script into C++ headers describing the structures, and associated metadata for the Lua wrapper. These headers and data are then compiled into the DFHack libraries, thus necessitating a compatibility break every time layouts change; in return it significantly boosts the efficiency and capabilities of DFHack code.
Global object addresses are stored in symbols.xml, which is copied to the dfhack release package and loaded as data at runtime.
Remote access interface
-----------------------
DFHack supports remote access by exchanging Google protobuf messages via a TCP socket. Both the core and plugins can define remotely accessible methods. The ``dfhack-run`` command uses this interface to invoke ordinary console commands.
Currently the supported set of requests is limited, because the developers don't know what exactly is most useful.
``remotefortressreader`` provides a fairly comprehensive interface for visualisers such as Armok Vision.
