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AMD authoring tools

Writing a mission's .amd file is writing a graph — scenes reveal quests, quests signal each other, dialogue branches, landmarks anchor the map. Past a couple of dozen headings that graph is hard to hold in your head. The Artemis AMD VS Code extension gives you a set of tools that read the same .amd and show it back to you — so you can navigate it, validate it, and edit it without scrolling the raw text.

They all read the live file (they refresh as you type), and every row links back to its source line.

For mission writers

These are views over your .amd — open one on the mission you're editing. Nothing here ships inside a mission; it's authoring help in the editor.

Open a tool

With an .amd file focused, use the editor title-bar icons (top-right of the editor) or the Command Palette (Ctrl/Cmd-Shift-P → "Artemis AMD: …"). The icons are ordered for a document's life — authoring first, live testing last:

Story Outline · Story Graph · AMD Resolver · Mission Map · Preview · Preview-in-session · Mission Inspector

Once any tool is open, its top bar has buttons for the others — jump between Outline, Graph, Resolver, Map, and Inspector without going back to the text editor. Tools open in the same editor group (as tabs, not new splits), and opening one that's already showing your mission just re-focuses it.

Story Outline

A searchable list of every node, grouped by section, with a detail pane on the right. It's "navigate the story like code": type a name to find a node, click it to see its editable fields inline, a 1-hop mini-graph of its immediate neighbours, and its Leads to / Reached from connections (each a chip that re-focuses on click). This is the default view for a large mission — it stays readable at any size because it never draws the whole graph.

Story Graph

The whole story as a node-link diagram, laid out in swimlanes by section. Good for seeing shape and flow. It has search (type to spotlight matching nodes; Enter cycles them), section filters, collapse, hover-spotlight, and right-click → Focus to zoom into one node's neighbourhood. Drag one node onto another to add a choice edge.

AMD Resolver

AMD fails silently — a typo'd heading drops a whole quest; a Then: reveal X that points at nothing just… goes nowhere. The Resolver makes that visible. Two panes:

  • Resolved model (left) — every heading as the engine resolved it, grouped by kind (quest / scene / dialogue / lifeform / scan / landmark / …). Expand a node to see its references both ways: → leads to (what it reveals/reaches) and ← reached by (what reveals it). Each reference is marked ✓ resolved or ✗ dangling.
  • Red flags (right) — everything that's broken: dangling references, orphan headings (unreachable — nothing reveals them and they have no When:/signal trigger), and structural / cross-file lint. Sorted worst-first, each jumps to source.

Single-click a row to browse (a reference selects the related entity; a red flag highlights its node); double-click opens the source line. An empty "reached by" list is exactly why a node shows as an orphan.

Live overlay. With a mission running under sbs debug, the Resolver shows each quest's live state — a badge reading active / secret / complete / failed / idle, or not granted for a quest the running mission hasn't created yet. The header flips from ○ static to ● live while state is streaming. (Dialogue/scene "fired" state isn't tracked by the engine, so the overlay is quest-focused.)

Add a new entity

Each section header (in the Outline, Graph, and Resolver) has a "+ add". It inserts a new record of that section's kind — with the fields that section conventionally uses — creates the section if it doesn't exist yet, and opens it for editing (inline in the Outline). No remembering which fields a lifeform vs. a landmark needs.

Mission Map

Landmarks (At: i,j) and regions (Center:/Radius:) plotted on the sector grid. Drag a landmark to move it; the At: value rewrites in the source. The spatial companion to the list/graph views.

Mission Inspector — live

The others are static analysis of the file. The Mission Inspector is the live view: attach it to a running mission (it opens automatically on an sbs debug session) and watch the mission's actual state in a 2×2 grid:

  • World — every space object: side, kind, roles, and an Enemy? column (the diplomacy verdict — is this actually hostile to a player side, not just what side label it carries). Filter the table, tick enemies to show only foes, click a row to peek its inventory.
  • Signals — a live, timestamped log of every signal fired and how many routes it hit; filter by name, Pause to freeze the scroll while you read, and click ↪ emit / ↪ route:line to jump to where the signal was emitted or handled in source.
  • Widgets — the widget tree a console is building this frame (tag, rect, parent).
  • Brains — each NPC's behaviour tree with the active branch lit.

See also Debugging your mission for stepping through MAST itself.