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Acknex.exe with console

The Console

I often use printfs for quick debugging, but as you all know, printf is a messagebox in lite-c.

So, i made an acknex.exe with console visible. Note that this not a plugin, this is an acknex.exe replacement for 8.10.1

The console is NOT made with allocconsole and other weird stuff. The console is same process with the engine itself, it is the REAL stdout of the acknex.exe. So you do not have to worry about stuff like freeing console at all. In fact you do not need to make any changes to your code to have the console, you only need to replace the acknex.exe. It being the REAL stdout also results in that, if any of your plugins(or possibly any of the engine functions) use printf to print messages you will see them in the console. For example, when you run the knights on wheels example from samples folder,  you see the warnings printed by the physx plugin:

Last line printed to console is printed from lite-c.

The acknex.exe is pretty much the acknex.cpp from sdk_engine folder with some added command-line args handling, and compiled as a console app. Also note that this acknex.exe can't publish to your scripts exe. You would not want your players to see the console anyway.

The Printf

Of course, still, there is a problem. While lite-c compiler has stdlib built in, functions like strlen, sprintf is available, it has only one function that is not "standart". PRINTF. Instead of writing to stdout, it creates message box with the formatted message on it.  So it is not possible to write to the stdout with printf from Lite-c. As a workaround to this, i have a small wrapper dll for printf(i can't believe i just wrapped "printf"). Again it's not a plugin but a C dll, means it can be directly called from lite-c. You need to copy printf.dll and printf.h to your project directory( the folder that your main script file resides).

Acknexconsole 4 kb

To use console version of acknex.exe just replace it with your original acknex.exe, make sure you backup the original. If you encounter any problems, please comment here or on the forum thread.