November 2023 feature and fixes requests thread

Engine Development
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:narrat: Narrat requests for November :woman_technologist:

Continuing like last month, here’s a monthly thread for feature/fix/changes requests that are relevant to your project.

This thread is mostly to help learn about things that are affecting things now, so that I can focus some time on relevant things rather than older things that might not actually affect anyone at the moment.

:question: Is there something about narrat that annoys you or that you want to change?

Ideally, requests should be:

  • :gift: Something that could benefit other games too: If you want a new thing, try to think of a way to generalise it.
  • :gear: Something that you need for an active project: I’d rather help active projects with issues/new features than make theoritical features that may end up unused.
  • :memo: Ideally you should have an idea of how you’d want it to work practically, if it’s a new feature or change.

What qualifies

Anything goes, especially if it’s not too big. I believe there are lots of small improvements that could be made and would improve the quality of games and/or make it easier to work with narrat.

If you’re not sure how hard something would be to implement, feel free to suggest anyway.

How to request something

Reply to this thread, explaining what you want:

  • If it’s a bugfix, try to give details about the issue, including error messages etc if a technical issue
  • If it’s a new feature, give a proposal of how you’d like it to work (for example: sample config or made up script example for how you’d imagine using the feature)
  • If it’s a QOL improvement: Give whatever info is relevant and explain why it matters if not obvious
  • If it’s a change in how things work: Think about how this change could break existing projects or games if implemented, and how to make said change in a way that avoids disruption to other projects

More context

While I have some meatier pieces of work in mind that I progress on over time, every now and then people have small requests or issues that don’t require much work to fix. It can be more efficient for me if I can focus on what’s relevant to people right now, and fix a bunch of it at once.

Some of them also sometimes fall under the radar as I forget them (especially if they were just said on Discord), so threads like this one can be a good occasion to get a fresh list of ideas to focus on.

Of course, there is no guarantee of me implementing anything, as it will depend on feasability, ho much time I have, and other priorities

2 Likes
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On Mastodon you mentioned the possibility of hot reload for sprites, which would be super helpful when you’re trying to somewhat precisely position one on the viewport! With how smooth the new handling of config files is, it might be not too hard to implement it ? (pls correct me if I’m wrong)

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Yeah, I want to do that soon. Sprites don’t use the config since you create them directly in code, so it’s a bit trickier to implement, but it should be doable. It just needs another feature first to make it possible, which will be easier to do now that I’ve made all those changes.

You already have hot reload for buttons in viewport though, as those ones purely come from the config

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Ah you’re right, that’ll be useful to quickly pinpoint a screen position before placing a sprite in the meantime :+1: tyty!