HotkeyEditor.com, A Rich AoE2:DE Hotkey Editor

This is the code for HotkeyEditor.com, a site for viewing and editing Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition hotkeys. Only files from update 83607 (May 15, 2023) onwards are compatible.

Features

• Edit any number of hotkeys at a time
• Finding all hotkeys by which key is used
• More logical hotkey grouping
• Visualising all keys used by a group
• Search for hotkeys!

About

There's already a legacy editor out there, Hotkey Editor for AoE II, that works for AoK, AoC, HD, CP, and older versions of DE. However, DE's update 83607 split the classic .hki hotkey file into two .hkp files. I looked into forking @crimsoncantab's work and updating it, but I found it easier to make a new site since I have no experience with web2py and wanted a project to learn React with. The main feature I'd always wanted was a keyboard display for better visualization of hotkeys.

Credits

This project uses code from the aforementioned site Hotkey Editor for AoE II, using its associated repository. The main pieces I've used are the code to unzip and parse the hotkey files, the file associating the hotkeys with the in-game strings, and the file that associates the input keycodes with the keycodes used in the hotkey files.

In addition, I also found these pages from @KSneijders to be invaluble:

• HKP Hotkey Distribution
• HKP File Format

Future Ideas

• I would love to get the hotkeys of popular players and have them as starting presets.
• Building on this, a data analysis of the hotkeys that people create would be neat. Things like a heatmap for most common hotkeys would be neat, but would require me to start saving visitor's data (even if it's non-identifiable and completely anonymized).
• Right-click a key to start editing all hotkeys that use that key. Currently this isn't doable due to the way react-simple-keyboard rerenders, meaning I can't block the context menu from opening upon right-clicking a key if I also update key highlights in the same tick.
• Drag-and-dropping menus to visually reorganize them would be nice, but I don't think it's worth the effort.
• Session cookies so changes are persistent between sessions, allowing for easier continuation. Right now I prefer to not deal with cookies since it's much simpler.

Developing

In one terminal window:

1. Clone repository:

    git clone https://github.com/Patchnote-v2/hotkeyeditor.com.git
   

2. Go into newly cloned directory

    cd hotkeyeditor.com
   

3. Create a Python virtual environment

   python3 -m venv .venv
   

4. Active the new virtual environment

   source .venv/bin/activate
   

5. Install the Python requirements

   pip3 install -r requirements.txt
   

6. Go to the source directory

   cd src
   

7. Run the Django server

   python3 manage.py migrate
   python3 manage.py runserver
   

In a separate terminal

1. Go to the frontend directory

   cd hotkeyeditor.com/src/frontend
   

2. Install NPM packages

   npm install
   

3. Run server

   npm run start