PresetManager

What is this plugin?

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to keep track of all of the tags, attributes, collision groups, and commonly used property-sets in my game, as well as all of the ways these things can be combined and how code can expect them to be combined.

The PresetManager plugin is a window that allows developers to organize all of these things, even presets with only single things changed (e.g. tags like the tag editor, or attributes), and would satisfy a great deal of use-cases all at once, including the use-cases satisfied by the tag editor.

For example, a common use-case for tags is to tag many similar instances in your game, and then have some manager script register these tagged instances to apply some effect to them (e.g. applying an animation, making them hazardous like lava, defining possible interaction). It’s difficult to remember what the names of these tags are without using some third-party plugin to organize them.

With the recent release of attributes also, now it’s possible to have the code managing tagged instances also expect a specific arrangement of attributes on instances with that tag. For example, models tagged “Breakable” could expect attributes that define how much damage it takes, whether or not it’s flammable, etc. I would have to manually remember to add all of these attributes for every breakable model I create, or have to hunt existing ones down in my game hierarchy to clone them, or else my code will break.

What does this plugin offer?

• The ability to create “Presets”. (A Preset is a collection of properties, attributes, tags, and a collision group)
• The ability to apply Presets to instances in the selection.
  • Presets can be applied to any instance type. Property names that are not valid are simply ignored.
  • These presets could be applied additively or as a complete overwrite to an instance.
  • If I “add” a preset to an instance, only properties defined in the preset will be changed, missing tags and attributes will be added, and the collision group will be changed
  • If I “set” a preset on an instance, all properties will be reset to default, all tags and attributes will be deleted, and the Preset will then be added as above.
• The ability to name Presets.
• The ability to quickly find a preset by searching by name.
• The ability to duplicate Presets for quicker variant creation.
• Autofill suggestions for Properties and Collision Group.
• Automatic datatypes for Properties from API Dump.
• Settable datatypes for Attributes.
• The presets are serialized and saved, so your Presets do persist between sessions.
• Preset summary when the GUI is collapsed.
• Export Preset as standalone module for runtime preset application.
• Select all Instances that match the Preset.