A Native Mod Loader

animal-loader (A not-so-acronym for "A Native Mod Loader") is an experimental, unfinished project to allow the @kleientertainment games Don't Starve and Don't Starve Together to load native mods written in rust, and support WebAssembly plugins.

I started this project with very little knowledge of how LUA handles FFI, and quickly learned my way around the system, then was immediately hit with the roadblock of Klei disabling dynamic library loading in their game (which requires a re-compile to enable). So, I decided to just leave this project as-is in case it benefits someone else, or I need some of the code here later.

How it works

At runtime, the game loads this animal-loader like any other mod. The mod's LUA script then modifies the interpreter's package.cpath to include Facebook's luaffifb as a C module. This C module then loads animal-loader's main Rust source code via LUA <--> Rust FFI.

The goal was to have the Rust code then perform its own mod-loading step, and pull in WASM modules containing other mods, but I never managed to get to this step.

Installation

Make sure you have Rust's cargo and LUA's luarocks installed, then:

# Build the mod to ./build
make

# Copy the mod files into the game's mods folder (Linux)
cp -r ./build ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Don\'t\ Starve\ Together/mods/animal_loader

Then launch the game, and enable the mod.