Legacy:UnDox

Undox is a really well thought out project that unfortunately suffered from a premature abandon from its author. It has still a lot of flaws and bugs that make it look more like an alpha version than a definitive tool.

But even in its unfinished buggy version, Undox remains a powerful must-have tool for all wanabee uscript coders.

In essence, it's a specialized UnrealScript parser implemented in C++.

The idea of Undox is to create a .html documentation of all available UnrealScript (classes) existing in an unreal engine game that is installed on your hard drive, game directory.

During the installation UnDox asks you for the location of the System folder of that unreal engine game. It then proceeds to scan it to search all .u packages and extracts all classes (exported UnrealScript) inside of them.

Once the list of classes is parsed, the program will commence to document them: It will create a web page for each class (acessible from a central starting menu index) with all functions and variables edited and documented (with the coder's comment in respect to abstract function).

With that tool you can start accessing and examining every variable and functions from a class and start understanding how it really works.

But everything is not perfect, the last released version of undox has some serious issues (for instance it can't parse functions declared with the keyword 'event' instead of 'function' and it is confused by some declaration specifiers.)

Preliminaries

UnDox runs from the MS-DOS Command Prompt, and does NOT present a Graphical User Interface. There are several critical steps to perform prior to running the program that are necessary. First of all, UnDox must be unzipped into the Windows directory. Then, you must...

• Open UnrealEd 2, and then the UnrealScript Browser. Click on the Export All Scripts Menu selection. A popup window asks to confirm that exporting the scripts is actually what you want to do. The UnrealScripts are then deposited in File Folders in your Unreal Tournament directory. The original files are unaltered. If you don't do this, you will get an error message when you run UnDox that says: "No Classes Found".
• Enter the pathnames of the directory in which Unreal Tournament is installed, and the pathname of the directory in which you want the generated .html files to appear. If you want to specify the type of stylesheet, the third 'argument' must be noshow. There are other options also. And, if the pathname has spaces in it, you must use "quotes" around the argument. Example:

d:\Unreal Tournament

See the UnDox, Command-Line Options Page for complete information on the correct method for entering data in the Command Line.

The actual operation of the UnDox program takes less than 5 minutes. It generates a directory of .html files of slightly more than 20 MB size.

See also UnDox Revisited.

Related Topics

• Other applications
• UnCodeX – features a better HTML doc generator

Links

• The UnDox Webpage: http://www.planetunreal.com/undox/
• To get a look at what content the UnDox Program will output to your designated directory, take a look at this link: http://dxcbp.deusexgaming.com/DeusEx/