Godot-proposals: Add a way to save and load project templates

[me2beats]

Describe the project you are working on:
gdscript plugins

Describe the problem or limitation you are having in your project:
my workflow involves frequent creation of projects. I think this is not uncommon, especially when creating plugins.

I noticed that often when creating a project, I would like to have certain presets of this project, depending on its type and the characteristics of the project that I am going to work on, a specific set of project settings, scripts, plugins, scenes and assets depending on a project type.

The problem is it seems now I need to manually pre-setting each new project from scratch. At least current Project Manager dialog can either load a project or create a project.

Describe the feature / enhancement and how it helps to overcome the problem or limitation:
This could be fixed implementing something like project templates.

Describe how your proposal will work, with code, pseudocode, mockups, and/or diagrams:
one could create a project, do some settings, then save it as a project template
project — save as Project template

Then when you want to create a new project from template, in Project manager you could select Project Templates tab then:

1. specify new project directory
2. select one of project templates you have created
3. and press button "create from template".

As a result a new project will be created and all the selected template content will be duplicated there

If this enhancement will not be used often, can it be worked around with a few lines of script?:
I don't think so

Is there a reason why this should be core and not an add-on in the asset library?:
I think it's possible to implement this feature with a gdscript plugin, but it would have some drawbacks, for example the user can't use project manager for creating projects from template, since afaik there's no Project manager API like adding new nodes etc

[aaronfranke]

How would this be different from the existing project template system in the project manager?

[Zireael07]

1) The current templates are just an asset store category, he likely means offline templates on his own disk
2) The current templates are just projects, nothing special about them, no way to 'create from template'

[Xrayez]

There are actually quite a lot of proposals similar to this on GIP but they all try to achieve exact same on the high-level of thinking. The moment I've noticed such a pattern I've even created a topic in the Godot Ideas tracker named:

Speeding up creation of new projects or development workflows: godot-extended-libraries/godot-ideas#6

So yeah, even if Godot won't provide such tools out of the box, if someone wants to fulfill those proposals, there's already some work which can/should be done in this direction by third-parties (and perhaps Godot could also facilitate this process a little). So far, the problem was not the proposals themselves, but the way those "ideas" were presented here in GIP, one should see a bigger picture.

[me2beats]

How would this be different from the existing project template system in the project manager?

My bad I forgot there is already such a term as project templates. so maybe I need to rename the proposal.

My idea is to be able to save projects as templates locally in a specific directory, and then be able to create a new project from one of these templates, instead of using a webserver, as AssetLib does

Now I think the creation of a new tab "Projects Templates" in Project Manager is not needed, and instead of it one could simply use the Templates tab (that already exists).

So it may be worth renaming the proposal to something like "Ability to create projects from local templates in ProjectManager", without needing to use webservers

[Calinou]

You can make a copy of a project template folder from your local filesystem then use the project manager's Scan feature to find it.

I'm not sure if adding dedicated support is worth it, as we'd rather not suffer from the inner-platform effect.

[Xrayez]

I'm not sure if adding dedicated support is worth it, as we'd rather not suffer from the inner-platform effect.

I think web browsers themselves could be considered as something which replace operating systems nowadays (ChromeOS is an example, with office applications operating in a cloud etc), but nobody calls that anti-pattern, at least I haven't seen this mentioning.

Godot itself could also be considered as a self-contained environment where even UI applications can be built with relative ease, the GDScript language also facilitates this to a great degree.