This project aims at lowering the entry barrier for creating nice and re-usable scripts for SpaceEngineers. It builds upon the MDK-SE by Malware, by offering an opinionated structure and helpers for common tasks.

• Download the project.
• Copy-paste the EasyScript directory into your project.
• Inside Visual Studio:
  • right click on your project in the solution explorer.
  • select "Add → Reference..." from the menu.
  • in the Shared Projects group, tick EasyScript.

You no longer write your Program directly. Instead, you will be writing the MainScript, and EasyScript will call the appropriate functions at the right time.

Let's look at this scripts that shows a counter on all screens of the ship:

class MainScript : MyMainScript
{
    int Counter = 0;
    List<IMyTextPanel> Screens = new List<IMyTextPanel>();

    public override void onLoad(MyIni data) {
        Runtime.UpdateFrequency = UpdateFrequency.Update100;
    }

    public override void ScanBlocks(IMyGridTerminalSystem grid)    {
        grid.GetBlocksOfType<IMyTextPanel>(Screens, Block.OnGridOf(Me))
    }
    
    public override void onTick(UpdateType source) {
        Counter += 1;
        foreach (var screen in Screens) {
            screen.ContentType = ContentType.TEXT_AND_IMAGE;
            screen.WriteText(Counter.ToString());
        }
    }
}

Here is what each part does:

• onLoad: is called when the world has finished loading and the script configuration has been checked and it is ready to run. Use it to perform initialization. Here we just set our script to run every 100 ticks of game time.
• ScanBlocks: is called whenever you should rescan the grid. We use it here to get all screens that are on the same grid/subgrid than the ProgrammableBlock.
• onTick: is called at the frequency defined in onLoad. Here we go through the screen list and write the counter on each.

Try to run it.

Try to add a screen after starting the counter: it will not update. This is because ScanBlocks is not called automatically for performance reason. But you can make it trigger easily: simply click "run" with no argument, or run the PB from a timer with no argument.

Easy: we will need to implement onSave and modify onLoad.

First, to avoid duplicating things, let's give a name to the save counter:

// At the top of MainScript class
static readonly string SaveVersion = "1";
static readonly MyIniKey CounterKey = new MyIniKey(SaveVersion, "counter");

We will use it to remember current counter value when the game is saved:

public override void onSave(MyIni data)
{
    data.Set(CounterKey, Counter);
}

And modify onLoad to actually load the value from the saved game:

public override void onLoad(MyIni data) {
    Counter = data.Get(CounterKey).ToInt32(0);
    Runtime.UpdateFrequency = UpdateFrequency.Update100;
}

Note: ToInt32 converts the value to an int, the type we used for our Counter. There are also ToIn64() for long, ToString() for string, … The value in the parenthesis will be used as default value if no saved value was found.

We want now to let the user reset the counter manually, or using a button or sensor.

We simply add a function to handle the command:

public override void onCommand(MyCommandLine args)
{
    if (args.Argument(0) == "reset") { Counter = 0; }
}

That's it! You can now reset the counter by calling the ProgrammableBlock with argument reset, from the terminal menu or from some trigger.

Done! You can review the full code in EasyCounter/Program.cs