The Workshop
Entry posted by Josh ·
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The Leadwerks Workshop has been evolving over the last year, and here I will talk about how it came about and where we are going with this.
What We've Learned
Use of the Leadwerks Workshop has increased since the last major revision. Encouraged by this, I have added additional tools that make it easier to make models game-ready, like convex decomposition and automatic hit boxes on character models. The Steam WebAPI has been very helpful and allowed me to create a nice web-based interface for browsing the Leadwerks Workshop.
I overestimated the importance of easy updates. Although some Workshop items do receive continual updates, most people upload their content once and it's done. So this is not super-critical and a manual update button would probably be fine.
The download time of new subscribed items turns people off from subscribing to files. The entire "Subscribe" notion doesn't really fit with our design and is being hidden away, more or less.
The game player hasn't really taken off. Only three people have even used it to publish their game. At one time I was planning to turn the game player into a free app, but without a lot of games to play there's no carrot to motivate people to install it. Without a big install base, there's not much that can be done with that. The games catalog on our website does a better job of promoting games and is accessible to everyone, not just Leadwerks users. So this is probably a better route to distribute free games.
I'm glad I left the Downloads section up on our site because it gives me a gauge of how well the Workshop is working. Although most people prefer the Workshop, a few items still get posted to the downloads section, This made me realize the Workshop is competing based on convenience with zip downloads. I think I underestimated the average user's comfort with making a zip file, and the folder publishing approach made things slightly more difficult, or maybe just unfamiliar with how people are accustomed to doing things.
The latest implementation of the Workshop browser (available on the beta branch) has made the process of installing items much simpler, to where you just browse around and press a button to install. The simplicity of this design is encouraging to me, and I think it will lend itself very well to impulse purchases when paid items are added.
Where We Are Going
My plans for the Workshop involve focusing on the asset distribution side of it, with a focus primarily on 3D models.
Workshop items are going to become installable in any folder in a project. Instead of publishing a folder, you will select a zip file. The zip file must be pre-made with directory structure already intact. Whatever structure you lay out will be how it gets extracted. For example, if your zip file contains a file "Models\Vehicle\Car,mdl" then that file will be extracted to the same folder in the user's project directory. While this does open us up to the possibility of bad naming schemes and file overwrites, I am going to go with this based on what I said about user-created zip files earlier on this page.
Workshop items published before a cut-off date will retain their original behavior and still be extracted to an "AddOns" directory. This ensures that we maintain compatibility with existing games.
Tags will be expanded to include materials, maps, textures, sounds, models, prefabs, and scripts. Other types of files will be supported, including C++ libraries. For example, installing a C++ library into the project folder might populate the "Source\Libraries" folder with a new subdirectory for the lib.
Paid items are planned for, and current changes to the interface are being set up in preparation for this. Our DLC sales are quite high, and I think the convenience our install process will provide you with a good market for your 3D models.
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