Question about contributing, do reviewers have time

[Zehir]

Hello there;

I recently (a few months ago) started playing with Godot (coming from Unity). My game is, for now, just an idea, and I’ve spent a lot of time building systems for it — or contributing to plugins I use, like Gaea.

For my item system, I’m using Gloot, but there are some missing features, such as:

• Protoset editor
• Recipe / Craft system
• Loot table generation

Because of that, I started making my own resource manager, but it feels a bit sad to reinvent the wheel.

So I ended up with this question:
If I implement the features described above, should I make PRs to this repository? Or should I create separate addons that are compatible with Gloot?

More specifically: do you have time to review and merge PRs? There hasn’t been much activity on the repository in the last few months, so I’m not sure what the best approach is and would like your opinion on that.

Thanks, @peter-kish!

[peter-kish]

Hi!

Yeah, unfortunately I don't have a lot of time for GLoot lately, so I'm mostly focusing on critical bugs and issues. ☹️

Contributions are always welcome, although I'm trying to limit the additional features to a minimum as they can make maintenance even more difficult than it already is. I think the codebase is already fairly large and confusing for an addon, so I'm trying to only add stuff that would be used by most of the users and is not too much work to maintain.

If I implement the features described above, should I make PRs to this repository? Or should I create separate addons that are compatible with Gloot?

If it was me, I'd probably try to create a separate addon that depends on, and expands GLoot. That way we could expand on it without adding complexity to the core features. It could also make thing easier for you, because you wouldn't have to take the deep dive into GLoot code. However, this approach is somewhat experimental, since Godot doesn't have an official way of dealing with dependencies between addons, so I can't promise it would work flawlessly.

Starting from a clone or fork should also be fine but it might need to be synchronized from time to time with this repo to stay up-to-date with latest changes/fixes (although, as you noticed, the project hasn't been very active lately 😅).

But I think I would avoid expanding this repo for the sake of keeping things simple, but also because I might not be available to do the reviews which could block/hold your project back.

That said, once you have something functional and turns out to be very useful, I'd still be open to integrate it into this repo. I just think that separating development of additional features makes things easier for both of us.

Anyways, if you need any suggestions or (non-blocking) reviews feel free to contact me and I'll try to get back to you as soon as I can.

[Zehir]

Thanks for taking the time to respond.
Yes, it’s not an easy task to build a plugin that depends on other plugins.

I think you’re right; I will start making my own addon so I can control everything. Syncing the project in the future would otherwise be nearly impossible.

I will continue to think about what I should do and keep experimenting.