Fox: Tools to help develop with Godot engine | Hacker News Reader

Fox: Tools to help develop with Godot engine

github.com

89 pointschrisdugne11 comments

I'm currently exploring and using Godot and I'm super impressed by it. It's a fantastic piece of work in many regards.

Why would you want to sidestep the entire editor ecosystem and introduce a JS dependency to your game? Do it in GDScript/C++ instead and put it in the asset library where it belongs. If that's not possible, perhaps submit a pull request.

You do you of course, but promoting it on HN is implicitly saying that this is a good idea while it in fact works completely against the grain.

I couldn't agree more. Not to bash on this project, what is the point here exactly? Godot has an excellent build system(scons), plugin system with scripts(GDScript) and even native plugins with C++. And a bunch of tools that are super useful for development. Like you said, "wrapping it" inside NodeJS is just asking for trouble and might be a maintenance nightmare.

For context: I have been playing with Godot custom C++ modules in the past year and I've had a blast. Such as a wonderful project.

Pretty bare bones readme- I’m not really sure what this does still.

Any description what libs it adds to Godot? Any cost/benefit to adding a nodejs dependency to your development cycle? Examples where this is useful?

# CLI: coming from frontend world, the live reload is a must to have for my developments;

that was the first step for Fox CLI, and I added assets creation for ios/android stores;

Next step is to provide a helpful prompting to build debug/release versions

# libs: here this is pretty much sandbox for now: I gather sharable code for my games:

- an Animate API

- static functions like the ones I uses with lodash.js for example

I still need to write lots of doc for those parts, I'll do it alongside my game dev

Yes, but why drag in nodejs instead of just accepting the fact that developers using godot have a compiler handy and making a convenient little tool without requiring me to add JavaScript to a project that has in almost all likelihood, zero other need for JavaScript.

The unreal engine equivalent of this would be a few small c++ plugins extending the editor which already provides prompts for necessary rebuilds. I thought godot had a project aware editor, why aren’t you extending that to minimise the amount of work involved? What genuine need is there for a let’s be clear HUGE dependency like NodeJS for this small of a utility?

you're right, the nodejs dependency in not small;

I've picked it because I work with js on my daily basis and found http://yargs.js.org/ very handy to create beautiful CLI.

Another possibility could be to extract a binary to provide the CLI as an executable instead of the node project with yargs in dev-deps

And the other part of the project is are libs, not very well documented as of today, but real shortcuts for gdscript projects: Example the Animate functions based on the tween API;

WIP!

Yeah, a bit unsure what it does or what value it provides.

>watch your files and allow to live reload your game.

seems to be the only benefit (I can see), but is it useful enough to install a whole new library and mess with the NodeJs system? I can't say

With Godot's ability to load into scenes directly, I feel like live reloading is not as useful as it is in say a web-based application. Maybe better for rapid-prototyping things like tools rather than games though.

Godot already can reload scripts, tools and assets through the editor... In fact, this tool doesn't look like it does anything useful.

What I would love is a tool to create pck files from a set of images/models/audio files to create DLC directly on the server

This might be helpful for that: https://github.com/hhyyrylainen/GodotPckTool

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