@eve-online-tools/eve-resfile

Most third-party developers will eventually find themselves digging through EVE Online's client files, scrounging around for that one specific icon or image they want for their project. @eve-online-tools/eve-resfile is a plugin for Vite and Rollup to help with that.

How it works

The EVE Launcher downloads the client files from the binaries and resources servers. The latter being the interesting one for third-party developers, as it holds all the assets the client needs to run. The client knows where to fetch these files by means of the resfileindex.txt file. This CSV-like file contains a list of all their files by their internal path, and a path on the CDN or the local drive. If the client cannot find the file locally, it will fetch it from the CDN. The launcher works similarly; every update it checks what files have changed or are not present, looks them up, downloads them, and your client is patched and ready to go (there's a bit more going on, but you get the gist of it).

This plugin acts similarly. When configured, during development mode it will proxy requests to the CDN server, caching them locally, and during build time it will ensure that all the files imported are present and emitted as part of the build. This ensures that you can use the files in your application, without having to deal with keeping them up-to-date yourself.

Example

Using it is simple; you just import assets by their internal path (including res:/, this is what the plugin filters by), the plugin will do the rest.

Below, the code that is being used to render the image on the right.

A note about licenses, terms of service, and other confusing stuff

First of. I am not a lawyer, please don't think I am. That said:

As a third-party developer, you already have to deal with the Third-Party developer license agreement. There is also the Content Creation TOS that covers a bit more about content creation. Keep in mind that third-party applications also fall under this.

I'm not going to explain what is in these licenses. As I said, I'm not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. But as a third-party developer, you should probably be aware of the content of these documents.