GodotNuts Devlog 2

Quick note: Remember, if you want me to make the demo/full tutorial series on YouTube for this plugin, I need to get to 1K subscribers there. I'll be turning it into a game for sure either way, but it's a question of whether or not I open-source the code and give you a chance to see it directly. :)  https://www.youtube.com/c/KyleSzklenski

Hello all and welcome back! This is the second in a long series of devlogs for the GodotNuts REST-based Firebase plugin for Godot. We have some *massive* announcements, so let's jump right in.

First up: the next version of the plugin is in the Godot Asset Library already, and has a massive update! Specifically, you now have the ability to use Storage. Github user SISilicon, out of absolutely nowhere, decided to submit a PR regarding it, out of the goodness of his heart. The code for that PR was so well-written that the team happily accepted it, proving that even small open-source projects can succeed due to the passion of the Godot community. I highly recommend you check out his Github profile as well, as he has quite a number of awesome projects up there: https://github.com/SIsilicon

Meanwhile, the rest of the team has been quite hard at work on diverse projects. I, for one, have been working on my big end-to-end game/demo for the plugin itself. This is going to be unlike any game you've ever seen, and I'm obsessing over it, it's such an interesting idea. It includes full data for the game being downloaded from Firebase Storage, a concept I've never seen implemented. (Don't worry, each individual set of data that goes into Storage is pretty small and self-contained, so this won't cost a lot.) It also includes several controls from the Firebase-UI library, another library on which the GodotNuts team is hard at work.

This library is a set of drop-in controls (both Control nodes and normal nodes) that contain functionality to drag-and-drop use in your games. An example is shown in the video I've attached to this post - fenix (https://fenicenera.itch.io/), one of our primary maintainers and the Firestore implementer, created a SignContainer control that lets you just drop it into your scene, add a few settings, and you instantly have email login and/or anonymous login setup for your project. I've been working on other container controls as well, but more of the classic Firebase-UI style, where you can just put in a path in the realtime database and it'll automatically pull out the values and display them (once you're logged in) according to a template scene you also enter into the control.

Meanwhile, fenix has also been working on a different project - another one that's unlike anything I've ever seen. It's a Firestore database designer! This will let you create documents with fields and other collections and then reference them in your actual code, all done in a visual manner. It is simply beautiful. We're intending to implement uploading documents in this fashion *from* the Godot IDE, so you can design your entire game database, upload it, and reference it later in one or more games much more easily.

BearDooks (https://github.com/BearDooks) has been working on automatic authentication. What this means is when your user logs in, they need only login once - in the future, this will be used to make it quicker for your users to get into your game and prevent unneeded login screen usage. This is going to make it vastly better for your games, and it will annoy users the least possible amount. This sounds like a small upgrade, but it actually had a lot of work that went into it, and it was desperately needed. Note: this is secure, as it does not store any passwords or anything. It is pure magic.

That's all for now, but stay tuned for another massive set of updates in the near future!