Requested Features v.001

[vasonic]

Hello Dinglemancer,

Again, this is an amazing tool you have created! The feedback I give comes from a good place and a deep desire to help you turn your engine into the most popular engine to use for retro games. I would like it to be as well known as Unity or Godot. My ramblings come from a 20 year career in the game industry. I have seen many proprietary and commercial engines through many iterations. I know quite a bit about production and mostly speed. Know these are my observations, requests and options, I don't speak for everyone :)

I have a very long list but to start these I deem the most essential.

Add an Installer
I believe you have someone helping you with this via Cmake?
As an artist I am not familiar with setting up toolchains and work environments. I have avoided using Devkit pro for years and so have a few other talented people I know because It is written by programmers for programmers no interface just a bunch of scripts very impressive code and scripts from what I hear but if only the elite can use it what good is it? Try to keep installs and setup as simple as possible. Anything you can do to offload that so creatives can hop on your engine will be a massive boost to Octave. Visuals will always attract more than a good code demo. Come for the visuals, stay for the good code :)

Request for additional file support

1. FBX file support - export out of professional tools like Maya and 3DMax - Blender is the future but the present uses Maya
2. TGA's ( no texture compression - It is an industry standard for 20 years now also has alpha)
3. PNG's ( light compression handles alpha well - if you can't export TGA's you can typically png's )
4. JPG's ( horrible format for textures but for rapid quick testing useful - good for beginners )
   5 Gif's ( ancient format but good for animated flip book style textures - think a prop with a texture animated control console )

Ability to modify all key bindings
More than anything I think this is the most important feature you can add. Personally, I'd love to be able to set up profiles so Blender and Maya ( unity ) people can all navigate the interface as fast and as intuitively as humanly possible. In production time is everything! As an example I will explain why Maya is set up as it is and why it is the industry standard. Maya is the least intuitive modeling software I think there is...other than Houdini you need 180 IQ to use that software lol, anyways it has a 6mo - 1 year learning curve because it is set up for shortcuts and speed but not logic, R does not = rotate, T does not = transform, M does not Move. The reason why W = transform, E = rotate and R = Scale and the Alt shift and ctrl key are used in combination with context sensitive menus is because you never have to move your hand to access 80% of your tools and if you customize the menus it becomes 100%. It is the embodiment of speed and flow. Speed and flow are everything in the world of production. If I have to move my hand from away from 80% of my context sensitive menus every time I want to do something ( it will add time and frustration and no one wants to fight the editor. that's why key bindings and by extension custom profiles would be a massive win for your engine. It is a drop of water landing on your forehead..forever.

Primitives
for quick testing and prototyping you need to have privatives,
Box, Sphere, Pill, Plane, etc. with Collison ( maybe you have this I haven't seen it in your videos so I mention it here.

multi panel window displays
having an orthographic, perspective and camera views at the same time is a must!
Placing a camera or object is much easier and faster if I can look thru it while moving it from an orthographic view while verifying placement in a perspective view
( from the video I have seen I didn't see this if it is there I apologize, glad you added it! )

Animation and Shader editor
In one of your videos you mentioned this, both very good adds! Animation trees will be good with that feature set. Also make sure to leave a way for the code to call on the animation clips. These are huge undertakings especially the shader editor you may want to hold off on that for a while and rather have a list of console specific shaders for now.

More as it unfolds..in time
There is a huge list of requests - I also have console specific stuff too but. I don't want to abuse here... You are only 1 person and you are generously giving us access and your time for free. Thank you.

Lastly some advice
Try to setup your software so it works with and follow industry standards, don't ignore them the way Godot has, embrace them the way Unity and Unreal have. Out of the 3 listed engines which are popular and have had repeated commercial success? Unity and Unreal are easy to switch between because the have similar if not the same shortcuts. You don't have to reinvent the wheel just copy what the big boys do. There is a reason why they do that. ease of use. You want Professionals to flock to your engine. They will make your engine look attractive to other devs which by default will attract the youth.