A way of uploading template assets as file to PlayCanvas editor

Suggestions & Feedback
#1

I would like to share template files or make it easy to use for my team on any project. But right now it’s not really possible to upload template file to editor.

If that was a thing, I would like to develop some sort of store, where they can find and download various assets and use their projects.

I tried few different things like overriding clipboard localStorage to make them easier for users to upload templates to their projects, but it doesn’t work.

If that feature was available, I would’ve probably upload so many assets for people to use their projects, shaders. And this could change the whole potential of the editor.

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Exporting and Importing Templates (Prefabs) between projects
#2

Doesn’t copying and pasting assets between projects cover your use case? Assets | Learn PlayCanvas

You could have a single project of all your tools/templtes in a folders or a list of projects for different templates and assets.

We don’t have plans for a paid store or user driven store unfortunately at this stage.

#3

Copy/paste between projects works. No problem there.
We do that thing where everything is under one big project for assets/templates. That part works fine too.

I also don’t request for a paid store or user driven store from PlayCanvas. I know it’s not in the roadmap.

All I’m asking if PlayCanvas somehow provide a feature where templates can be uploaded as files, I’ll open a website and share assets with everyone!

I asked copy/paste thing because I know there is this clipboard functionality on editor API, I was going to hack and modify this JSON to provide easy-to-use functionality for anyone.

With really small and little changes on editor, you can unlock limitless possibilities.
And this kind of things should be the main prioritization method of any team, small changes → biggest outcome, not the other way around.

#4

Is this for paid assets?

The general problem we have is that we currently don’t support any import of assets with metadata. ie we support upload of scripts and FBX models but the metadata such as preloading, texture filtering etc is not supported at all for any asset.

So unfortunately, this is not a small job to do and also why we added the copy and paste of assets between projects.

That allowed users to copy an asset (and related assets) from any project they can access (eg public projects) into their own with all the meta data intact.

I do agree that importing and exporting assets would be great and chances are that it would need to be in zip archives. eg templates with the JSON hierarchy and related assets such as textures, models, etc. When the zip is uploaded, it will handle the remapping of ids as it does now with copy and paste.

In your situation, if I wanted to build a website now of assets:

If they are free:

Have public projects of the assets that people can copy between projects that are linked from the site. I’ve done this here with the touch joypad for example: Touchscreen Joypad Controls | Learn PlayCanvas

Users can copy a single folder to their project and import the template into the scene in a few clicks.

If they are paid assets:

This is not ideal and a complete workaround. I would export the project as an archive and have the zip downloadable. Users will download this, import the project privately and then copy and paste.

There’s also questions and issues around updating existing assets as we don’t currently support overwriting existing assets on copy and paste.

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#5

Created a ticket for this:

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