I'm LeftofZen, a part-time dev on the OpenLoco project. Whilst I'm active on the OpenLoco discord, I am not active here; however I know some people still use these forums, so I have made an account to post about some tools I've been working on for just over a year to support both OpenLoco development and modding of the game itself. Actually, @glenjimen already did just this (viewtopic.php?t=91490) but that was a while ago and I thought I'd introduce it officially.
Object Editor
https://imgur.com/a/zaOC29G
I've been working on an open-source modern written-from-scratch "Object Editor" for Locomotion objects and data files in general. It was intended as a replacement to the outdated and incomplete LocoTool, which I'm sure any modders out there will be familiar with. It is still heavily in development and there are plenty of quirks, bugs, incomplete features and poor UI/UX choices - however it does work and is far more capable than LocoTool ever was or will be. Please feel free to check it out, make suggestions, submit bug reports, contribute pull requests, etc!
GitHub main page: https://github.com/OpenLoco/ObjectEditor
Downloads page: https://github.com/OpenLoco/ObjectEditor/releases
Object Service
https://imgur.com/a/D9EsyOw
On top of this standalone editor, I've also developed an "object service", which is a live http service hosted by myself that serves every Locomotion DAT object we (the OpenLoco discord community) know about. The aforementioned Object Editor connects to this service and allows users to view/download objects locally to use in-game. Whilst this service is also heavily in development and has known bugs, it is currently functional. I think you will all find this quite a useful service for finding pesky objects you are missing to load that obscure scenario or old save file! It also contains a lot of extra metadata about objects that does not fit into the DAT format, for example author, creation date, licence (if any), etc.
One small note on that actually - a few months ago @Zeak made a post here (viewtopic.php?t=91875) that was directly related to this topic - how I'm going about hosting and serving objects with regards to copyright/licensing/author permission. I want to be clear, my goal is to make all objects available to everyone because that's the spirit of open source development and community. I want to attribute every object to a creator/author, give credit where credit is due, add a licence if the author requests it, etc. However I also want to respect the wishes of everyone out there who has made a mod, and as such if you do not want me to host your mods, I am more than willing to comply and take them down/stop hosting them. Please let me know your thoughts here or on discord.
GitHub readme: https://github.com/OpenLoco/ObjectEdito ... ectService
OpenLoco
Finally just a small advertisement for OpenLoco; please come and join the discord server if you're interested in these tools or the project in general. Exciting things are happening - apart from the game getting close to being fully reimplemented, we're currently starting up work on the asset recreation project, where we need to create sprites and sounds for all the vanilla objects in the game. If this piques your interest we need all the help we can get. Alongside the Object Editor, I'm hoping to start a new wave of Locomotion modding and bring more people into or back to this game so, in a word, company performance is going up! Hope to see you there!
edit: looks like images from imgur don't load here
i've changed the img tag to url so you can at least click the links