Future of the Godot asset library?

[JaimieVos]

I was curious about the future of the Godot asset library. In the readme I see that this repository will be deprecated, is there any idea when this will be? The current asset library lacks many features and I would love to contribute but it wouldn't be useful to contribute to this if it will be replaced soon.

[hichemfantar]

I'm wondering the same, I want to contribute in making a great open source marketplace but the current state of the project isn't very encouraging.

[Calinou]

See this comment, which is still relevant as of today: Calinou/godot-asset-library-laravel#467 (comment)

As a result, this current backend is in maintenance mode. You can open pull requests, but large sweeping changes are discouraged, especially if they require database migrations.

[hichemfantar]

@Calinou It's good to hear that a replacement is planned.
Look forward to working on the new asset store in the future.

[mellonedain]

Maybe this comment will be more interesting for You: godotengine/godot-proposals#7735 (comment)

Topic looks like the moderation team try to forgot about a programmers problems. I am not the moderator and can handle it only in this way.

[yinvoke]

When will the new asset store be released?
The current store cannot see usage times and ratings, and I am unable to estimate the high cost of using plugins and assets😭

[Calinou]

When will the new asset store be released?

We don't have an ETA for it.

[mellonedain]

When will the new asset store be released?

We don't have an ETA for it.

Very bad news!

Could You prepare simple list of goals what You want to achieve? Maybe we can help You?!

[ottovw]

@Calinou Who's working on this? I'd be happy to help building this. How to get involved?

[YuriSizov]

Thanks for all your offers, but it's not in a state where we can involve external contributors yet. It's not the technical side of things that is currently holding it back, so you will have to wait a bit.

[lucena-alex]

Thanks for all your offers, but it's not in a state where we can involve external contributors yet. It's not the technical side of things that is currently holding it back, so you will have to wait a bit.

any chance y'all have a moment in mind in the future to talk through what aspects are currently in discussion or development, for public input? i've found the asset library has a lot of room for improvement in non-technical aspects that i'm sure others would be capable of and excited to assist in : ) specifically i'm interested in UX improvements for the interface. it seems to me there are a lot of changes that could be made to make the library more useful for both contributors and "consumers" that don't require API changes or database rejiggering

[Calinou]

any chance y'all have a moment in mind in the future to talk through what aspects are currently in discussion or development, for public input? i've found the asset library has a lot of room for improvement in non-technical aspects that i'm sure others would be capable of and excited to assist in : ) specifically i'm interested in UX improvements for the interface. it seems to me there are a lot of changes that could be made to make the library more useful for both contributors and "consumers" that don't require API changes or database rejiggering

There's ongoing discussion here: godotengine/godot-proposals#8114

[YuriSizov]

@lucena-alex You can freely discuss your suggestions either in this repo (if they pertain to the web side of things) or in the proposals repo. The work on the new asset library doesn't include UX changes at the moment. It's about legal bureaucracy and other such stuff. Which is not something general public can help with and needs to be done by the foundation.

UX improvements can be discussed publicly by anyone.

[linkerlin]

If this old project is abandoned, could it be handed over to someone willing to maintain it for further maintenance? It feels a bit of a waste to abandon it, after all, its' functions are still usable.

[Calinou]

If this old project is abandoned, could it be handed over to someone willing to maintain it for further maintenance? It feels a bit of a waste to abandon it, after all, its' functions are still usable.

You can still open pull requests, but we'd prefer not handing over maintenance to someone not part of the core contributors as this is code that is deployed on a production server (with the security implications this entails).

[hichemfantar]

@Calinou what's the process for becoming a core contributor or being a part of the new store project?
I have plenty of experience in full stack projects and I’d love to work on this project.

[coppolaemilio]

Hello everyone! I wanted to answer some of the questions here:

I was curious about the future of the Godot asset library. In the readme I see that this repository will be deprecated, is there any idea when this will be? The current asset library lacks many features and I would love to contribute but it wouldn't be useful to contribute to this if it will be replaced soon.

The original plan was to replace this asset library with a new one, but due to lack of time and resources we were not able to make the change. This current platform lacks many features but it is functional enough to provide users with thousands of plugins on all available Godot versions.

If this old project is abandoned, could it be handed over to someone willing to maintain it for further maintenance? It feels a bit of a waste to abandon it, after all, its' functions are still usable.

We would not abandon this project if it is still in use, but we are not dedicating extra resources to it. You might have notice that not so long ago we added dark theme, improved the layout and even recently there were contributions by the community to improve some bugs that we encountered. We've been merging and reviewing PRs, so you are welcome to do so!

The new Asset Store

We are working on a new asset store, and this new platform will eventually replace the asset library. This won't happen automatically. It will be a gradual transition until we know that all the features existing here are also covered in the new platform. We are working on it, and it will be published when ready.

I wish I could tell you "It is coming out on this date", but we don't want to disappoint you if we don't meet the deadline, so we prefer to wait until we are absolutely sure of when that will be.

Like Yuri said in his comment before: "...[the new asset store] is not in a state where we can involve external contributors yet. It's not the technical side of things that is currently holding it back, so you will have to wait a bit.".

I appreciate the offers to help, but we are not in need of new web developers. If by any chance you are a lawyer and know a lot about EU digital store laws, feel free to reach out 😅

I will be closing the issue now, but I'm happy to keep answering questions here if you have more. Thanks for the offers and the interest!

[Xinart]

@coppolaemilio Any news on the status of the new asset store ?
And will be it integrated to the Assetlib pannel of the godot Engine like the current one ?

Also it seems like there is several Godot asset library, and this is really confusing :

https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset
https://godotmarketplace.com/product-category/2d/2d-tools/
https://godotassetstore.org
https://godotassetlibrary.com

Can we have clarification on those ? I think we may need be alined on one site instead of being spread on several ones (we should take exemple on the Unity Asset store on this one)

Also, considering the future asset library we should get a star system rating to make it easyer to know which asset/plugin works fine instead of trying 20 to find one that works fine and meet you need. Advanced filetr systems will be also appreciated to facilitate the reasearch i think.

Hope it make sense what i mentionned, if there anything i can do to help on this topic let me know

[Calinou]

And will be it integrated to the Assetlib pannel of the godot Engine like the current one ?

Yes, that's the plan 🙂

Can we have clarification on those ?

Only godotengine.org/asset-library/asset is official. The other ones are unofficial and we don't provide any support for them, although you may be able to integrate them in the editor using the Editor Settings if they use the same API as the official asset library.

Also, considering the future asset library we should get a star system rating to make it easyer to know which asset/plugin works fine instead of trying 20 to find one that works fine and meet you need.

Some kind of review system is also planned.