asset.party / packages - Feedback, Developer Experience, and more

[trundlr]

To start, I will just say that I understand asset.party is a work in progress. I am sure there are many planned or obvious features that will be implemented that we may mention here. I simply want a way to ensure developer feedback is heard. Redundancy on good ideas is never a bad thing.

Asset Party Developer Experience

There are some features that we want, but could be implemented several different ways, and affect things in a multi-faceted way.

Package versioning

• Package Selection should be streamlined and support version selecting #3693
• Semantic versioning for packages #3699
• Game branching on asset.party #3042

I replied to this issue with my wants, but it summarizes as:

• Do not automatically set a new version to live in asset.party
• Allow us to schedule when a version of a package goes live
• Allow us to semantically version our packages
• Give us the ability to have a "staging" version set so we can test with our org

Package Privacy and Permissions

• Add a Private/Whitelist feature for Games, Addons, ect. #3691

Carson hit the nail on the head here, but I do have a few extra wants:

• Allow a properly private organization and packages
• Add a whitelist to allow certain members or orgs to access content
• Ensure on the s&box end that a user is properly authed before allowing them to start downloading content.

Package Uploading

• Publisher UX should be improved to not overwrite data saved on website, but not in addon #3113

I have a couple other issues to make, but the uploading experience could be improved.

• Tags do not populate into the uploader from asset.party or the .sbproj. It seems like tags in various locations are just completely disconnected.
• Is there a reason we can't have a tool that automatically determines what assets are needed for the menu? Plus, the disconnect between project files and menu files just feels awkward to me. I feel like there could be improvement (I'll make an issue with more thoughts on this later)

I'll update this discussion with more information and feedback. I would love to hear discussion from more members of the community too!

[CarsonKompon]

I definitely agree with semantic versioning, especially when it comes to Libraries. Libraries could have "pain days" of their own in a version 2.0.0, but it wouldn't break all games that are running version 1.9.X Latest. It also means that if people want to be on the 1.9 feature set, they can still get further 1.9.X updates without worrying about the 2.0.0 pain day update.

[Andrei15193]

Definitely need version selection, especially for maps and other assets. You may be doing things on top of a map that is maintained by someone else and an update may just break your game.

Semantic versioning can be a bit tricky to get around, I'd add that with guidelines for code maintenance (mostly using git tags for releases rather than branches). Your dev branch may be 2.0.0, but you still need a way to get the code from 1.9.0 and apply a patch on top of that with ease.