Asset Library standalone examples/samples download

[hsandt]

I noticed that some add-ons in the Asset Library (or even wild public repos) offer examples / samples, i.e. a collection of scripts and scenes to get an idea of how the add-on is working and get started quickly.

It would be nice to have a system that allows to download such examples directly from the Asset Library, similarly to Unity's Package Manager > Package > Samples list > Import in project buttons.

For now, you can (a) test the examples in a repository by directly cloning the repository and testing the add-on repository itself as the demo project. Or you can (b) copy the examples folder and paste it in your own project to test them, but in any case that's some extra operations.

However, as I was testing (b) on the add-on Yet Another Behavior Tree, I noticed that while example scripts are generally fine, example scenes tend not to be standalone as they may require certain game settings, causing things like window issues if your game is setup differently. See Earewien/godot-yet-another-behavior-tree#32 for an example with stretching setting conflicts.

In Unity, this is similarly to the difference between (i) full sample projects, which are packages containing a complete project and that you should open as a new project VS (ii) isolated sample assets like scenes, which should work in most projects (there may be some limitations such as requiring a minimal graphics pipeline, though). If you import a package of type (i), the editor would warn you that Project Settings may be overwritten and ask you whether you want to proceed.

In the case of Godot, do you see other things than the Window settings that could get in the way of creating standalone add-on examples?

And for the case of Window > Stretch settings, do you have an idea on how to make a scene work despite setting differences (such as setting them temporarily at runtime)?

If we can solve these issues to make examples truly standalone, then we could encourage add-on developers to add them to their add-on in a standard way, and make the examples importable.

Otherwise, we'll have to keep such examples either in the add-on repository, or in a separate demonstration repository containing a project using said add-on and some examples of usage. In both cases, the user will have to clone/download them separately to test the examples.