Why do plugins have to be in the Project folder.

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+5 votes

Since you can enable/disable plugins I don't understand why they are project specific wouldn't it be better to place them in an Editor dependent Directory so you can use them in every project if you enable them ?
Or am i missing something ?

related to an answer for: Runtime Plugins API
in Engine by (333 points)

3 Answers

+3 votes
Best answer

Plugins will be project specific and global.
The reason is, because with the new plugin system you are able to write your custom nodetypes. Now if you share a project with someone and he doesn't have this plugin installed the project will fail to run.
This is a main reason why plugins have sit in a project folder.

But as far as I understood Juan, there will also be plugins that doesn't have to be project specific, but this plugins will not have that much functionality.

by (192 points)
selected by
I haven't either tried it yet nor talked to reduz, but reading the question and this answer, wouldn't a more usable solution be to let the editor create a plugins folder inside the project folder at the same time it creates engine.cfg?

Then, the editor can copy plugins used from /.godot/plugins to projectfolder/plugins or remove them as they're used/discarded from use in the project.
by (225 points)
Thank you,
The thing I was missing was that this makes a lot of sense when you share Projects.
I now understand why it's solved like that.
I also agree with @dc1a0 that it would be great if the editor would handle the Plugins folder. (if that's not already the case ?) Maybe it also would be possible to use an editor tool to get plugins from a foreign project (/any_project_Idownloaded/plugins) to your .godot/plugins folder so that you can use them in any other project without copying the files manually.
by (333 points)
I was also confused why plugins would be bundled with projects. But reduz has told me that it is important for him that this works well in a teamwork environment. Didn't thought about that myself, because I don't work with godot in a team :)
by (192 points)
+1 vote

Godot Plugins installations are not project specific.

The paths to the plugins folder is
GNU/Linux: ~/.godot/plugins
Windows: %APPDATA%/Godot/plugins

After copying the plugins to the above folder, you can enable/disable plugins for all projects.

by (751 points)
this behavior is going to change in the future.
by (192 points)
edited by
Yeah, I saw the examples provided.
I will say now it is the best thing to make plugins inside the project so that you can have a single project folder and the godot executable which works out of the box at any time.

So if we give our project to others, they don't have to install all required plugins. Our project folder will contain all the necessary ones.
by (751 points)
–1 vote

I like the way of node npm manage this, when we have a package manager we could have in the repository project a requirements file and run "gpm install ." to download addons needed.

We could use currently npm directly as package manager if download our addons as node modules ... and rename node_modules folder.

by (68 points)
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