What addons should get official versions?

I've been think about this a bit lately.

It seems like C2 is becoming pretty mature now. Most of the extant limitations are to do with the IDE, which seems unlikely to change much until C3.

With the IDE on the back-burner, what I'd like to see is the incorporation of important third party addons (behaviors, plugins, effects) as official. Much like what happened with the 'Function' plugin, which was a game changer for C2.

The first thing that comes to mind is Paster/Canvas. It's mind-boggling what can be done with it, and it would be an invaluable addition to the native C2 toolkit.

LiteTween is another time saving behavior that should be in C2 by default. It's simpler and more intuitive than mucking around with lerp/qarp/cubic, and as it's mostly just value manipulation, it would be unlikely to break very often.

There are many more great plugins, but those would be my top two.

Yours?

Never used litetween so I cannot tell (I though it was used to move from point a to point b), but paster would clearly be nice to have (split screen, screenshots, the possibilities are big), however as long as the canvas plugin cannot fully take advantage of webGL, it is a big No for me.

but then again, officially supporting these is not a requirement, sure that gives the security but I would rather see a "built in store" inside C2 and on the scirra website to track easily addons update, install them easily, see the last C2 version they were tested with, different categories (like beta, movement, behavior, plugin, effects, etc..), changelogs, etc.. would be much more useful than filtering everything into an official support, that could even help installing them if needed to open a capx.

since right now, keeping track of 3rd party plugins and behaviors is a chore.

Good thread! My brief thoughts on this:

Spritefont+. Getting the correct appearance of sprite fonts is easy with this and a pain with the stock plugin.

LiteTween / Ease Tween Mod or an equivalent, as discussed.

Paster / Canvas as well.

Full Box 2D physics behaviours. I know that rojo has done a lot of work with Chipmunk, but there are limitations and Box 2D runs just as fast as asm.js physics in chrome.

That's all I can think of really, the only other limits I've bumped into have been with my imagination or time available....

+1 for Chipmunk. It has loads of very useful features although it wouldnt hurt to impliment Box2D in full.

Pater & Canvas too.

+1 for Chipmunk. It has loads of very useful features although it wouldn't hurt to implement Box2D in full.

Pater & Canvas too.

I would love to see chipmunk become an official option. BUT, I don't think there's much chance of that happening.

I can't imagine Ashley maintaining 2 separate physics engines. Chipmunk's lack of an auto-rest state is also a drawback for mobile, even though it works better when things get crazy.

Would love to see Box2D expanded.

Maybe a system date and time plugin.

I don't see an issue with installing third party plugins. Making plugins official would just transfer the burden of maintaining the plugins from the third party developers to basically Ashley, which I don't think would be a good trade off. It would require a lot of time to debug and add features since he'd have become familiar with what the code is doing. More likely the plugins would be made from scratch with differing features in mind so it would be different.

And while I'm flattered that a few of my plugins/behaviors were mentioned I'm happy to keep updating them myself.

Worst case if a new C2 update breaks my plugins a fix may take a bit to come out.

TiAm

By auto-rest state do you mean sleeping? If so the behavior already has that. Look at the "is sleeping" condition.

I don't see an issue with installing third party plugins. Making plugins official would just transfer the burden of maintaining the plugins from the third party developers to basically Ashley, which I don't think would be a good trade off. It would require a lot of time to debug and add features since he'd have become familiar with what the code is doing. More likely the plugins would be made from scratch with differing features in mind so it would be different.

And while I'm flattered that a few of my plugins/behaviors were mentioned I'm happy to keep updating them myself.

Worst case if a new C2 update breaks my plugins a fix may take a bit to come out.

TiAm

By auto-rest state do you mean sleeping? If so the behavior already has that. Look at the "is sleeping" condition.

I haven't used chipmunk a lot yet, so perhaps I'm speaking out of my hat. I'll take a look at the 'is sleeping' condition.

I'm all for a store with third party plug-ins that are supported by those third parties. For example, I'd be happy to pay for a maintained version of chipmunk for c2.

But I also think there are some plugs that are too important to be left to an unpaid third party to maintain. IMHO, Canvas/Paster is one of those.

If we were all paying $1000 a year to license C2 like with Unity Scirra could probably afford to hire a staff of developers to do something like this.