Regarding issues...
Even just opening the My Library window takes roughly three minutes for me ("Downloading Marketplace information" and "Populating list"). During this time, the IDE's refresh rate drops to 1FPS and I can't continue working with it as the loading window is modal. In the test I just did, it even froze GM:S completely for a few seconds, then the loading window closed and started the loading process again from the beginning.
This is such a huge pain that I've created a local project which contains nothing but the assets I use the most, and whenever I want to add them to another project, I just grab them from that instead of going through the trouble of opening My Library.
I can clearly remember this not having been
that extreme a few years ago, but also can't say that I've been able to observe a linear increase in loading time in relation to the number of assets I have purchased. It seems exponential to me, which makes me worry greatly about future purchases.
Hopefully needless to say, this seems like the biggest deal breaker for me as it
requires me to break my workflow in order to use assets, and should be the highest priority to fix.
Another big issue is that there seems to be no way to download older versions of assets. This is also quite problematic, as the newest version of an asset is not guaranteed to be free of bugs or other issues. Keeping local backups of older versions (which I'm currently doing) may be a pre-emptive workaround (although it feels more like a wet bandaid), but that plan falls apart as soon as I encounter this type of problem with an asset I've just newly purchased.
In such a situation, I'd be left with only the option to wait for the developer to release a new version of the asset. This could lead to me having to stall my project's progress, forcing me to suffer the consequences of a problem I'm not even responsible for in the first place... and I'm sure all developers are equally fond of
that concept.
Regarding features... there are quite a lot of things that come to mind. Most of them are related to organization, and the current lacking possibility thereof.
There is no way to filter based on category or name, both of which seem like basic features that should be a given for something like this.
I can't organize my assets as I can't add tags (and can't filter by tags) or even mark assets as favorites. The latter seems like a basic feature that's missing, the former would be a luxury.
It's impossible to sort out particularly useful/useless assets because there are no folders I can put them into. There is only one very long list which is very cumbersome to navigate (the aforementioned lag issues contribute to that).
Being able to sort assets into folders seems like an ideal solution for this to me, as I could then add all of my favorite assets to one folder, all assets that are useful for SHMUPs to another, for RPGs to yet another... (as some assets may overlap, ideally I would be able to add one asset to multiple folders - maybe "collections" would be a more fitting but also more obscure term to describe that?)
Minor nitpicks...
The "Awaiting Download" / "Ready For Use" font colors are way too bright for use on a light gray background. This is probably exclusive to the GM8 skin.
Scrolling down the My Library list is snail-paced. It takes eight scrolls to scroll enough vertical space to scroll by one asset. Somewhere between one third to half of an asset per scroll seems ideal.
Short version:
- Having too many assets results in ungodly startup time and lag. This should be fixed.
- Don't force asset updates down our throat. Let us download and use whatever version of an asset we want/have to.
- Folders/collections or something similar should be added.
- Users should be able to add tags to assets locally.
- The ability to filter by name or tag should be added.
- Overly bright yellow/green look bad on the GM8 skin.
- Scrolling the My Library list shouldn't take an eternity.
Another thing YYG should do (again) is publish their roadmap for GM:S/GM:Next. People should not invest a lot of time and energy into developing an extension for the marketplace, only to have YYG pull the rug out from under them by releasing a new version that provides the features of their asset. It's hugely demoralizing to invest so much effort and then not expect any sales because YYG were secretly working on the same thing, and now it's included in Standard or Pro. I don't know that this has happened, but it would be terrible for a Marketplace seller if it did happen.
I second this (but am aware of the complaytechations surrounding it), albeit not purely for Marketplace reasons... but I'll save that for another topic.
I've worked on an extension for a few days that would enable users to play audio and define loop points for it. Then
audio_sound_*et_track_position were added.