nothke/flax-pros-and-cons.md

## flax-pros-and-cons.md

      
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              flax-pros-and-cons.md
            
          
    Pros


Entering play mode is instant!
Has very intuitive coding style.

Very Unity-like, but even when it's not identical to Unity, it's very intuitive


Gives you an option to install daily master branch editor in the launcher
Profiling with Tracy!
Unlike Godot:

Prefabs (scenes) don't hide children
Can apply prefab from scene
Input is not a separate function, but it happens in update (like in Unity)
Has distance joints
Can set joint anchors at runtime


Unlike Unity:

Has one render pipeline
Has real time GI
Can use .net 8
Starts faster and enters play mode faster
Much lighter


Cons

Nitpicks


small UI text margins (let the text breathe a bit!)
Materials list in renderable mesh actor says "Entries" instead of the logical - "Materials"
Drag and drop highligh color is blue, which is confusing with materials
Plugins window says "plugin" 4 times, Plugin - window, Plugin - sub-frame, Clone Plugin Project, Add PLUGIN project. Whyy?? :D

Suggestions


It's not clear what type an actor is in the inspector

for example the "Sky" actor never says "Sky" on it.. There is a "sun" segment but it's just setting the sun parameter, which makes it extra confusing


Add a button to quickly toggle all gizmos on/off in editor view (grid, editor sprites..)
Add an option to auto save settings

for example when changing exposure in eye adaptation, right now you must manually ctrl+S on every change. It would be useful to have it be auto saved on every param change, or at least when the drag is released.


Joints auto anchor should be on by default IMO, right now, they always anchor at connected body's center, which makes it pop at start
Add button to "reset anchor to auto" - set custom anchor values from auto anchor
Show if joint is violated in scene view. In distance joint perhaps by showing a red line if both anchors are further from max distance.
Expose sky parameters, like planet scale, rayleigh coefficient etc, (some of which would trigger 3D texture rebuilds)
If an array element has a "name" parameter, elements should be named like that instead of entry 0, entry 1.. (that's what Unity does)
Add an option to automatically maximize the game window when running (like Unity does)
Plugin window:

Word "clone" is unclear to beginners, because if one is not familiar with git parlance you'd assume it means "copy", prefer not to use it. Instead I suggest making the buttons simply say "Add" and "New" (in that order, since Add is going to be far more used) instead of "Create plugin Project", "Clone Plugin Project"


Issues/Bugs


There's no rectangle selection
Pure reflection (spec 1, roughness 0, metal 0 should render reflected light identical to the environment, but is instead dimmer

to make it truly reflective I had to increase reflection probe intensity to 1.5


Gizmos issues (they need a lot more work):

Holding translation gizmo and moving into finity doesn't get it back once you move the mouse back
There's no way to uniformly scale with gizmos, I'd expect clicking on a cube in the center would do it, but it does nothing
Move/Rotate/Scale gizmo shouldn't disappear for out of far plane objects


Disabling the override in graphics settings doesn't revert the value
Changing a scale value that is set to uniform scaling in inspector doesn't make other floats identically rounded
Drag and dropping a material doesn't work for prefab instances (but can be set in inspector)
Sun disappears behind the flat horizon, but the sky is actually a sphere (to repro just put sky to a high Y and put sun to 90 degress on the horizon)
Each material opens a new undocked window instead of reusing the same docking
Dragging over the output log opens it
imgui plugin doesn't work

What I don't like (but can live with it)


Default unit is centimeters

Gamebreaking


3D asset importing: Objects either welded together, or split into separate files (where each uses all materials)
Assets importing is a separate process that needs to be done manually and is destructive.

Drag and drop a model file -> import window shows up -> press "import", and then the objects get converted to engine-friendly representation, and there's no original file linked
I just wish that it used a system like Unity:

Models are always original files, meta files contain import settings, game-ready meshes are actually stored in the library away from the user
Reexporting a mesh (from blender e.g.) and saving to the same file within a project AUTOMATICALLY triggers a reimport, and all models are converted thanks to the import settings in the meta file. Therefore, no human input is needed! (this is why it's the best!)


Colliders only added to rigidbody if immediate child