What is this?
PixiEditor is aiming to be a go to tool for any 2D creation and editing. This is an incredibly ambitious and challenging goal. We believe, that one of the things that is crucial for this, is letting community build and extend PixiEditor.
And this is what Extension Browser is for. We have divided its development into a few phases.
Phase 1 - Early Beta. We are here
The goal of Phase 1 is to test our extension backend and see how everything is working together and fund the development of next phases with paid extensions.
At this point, extensions SDK and ABI is in the alpha - far from being complete and not really open for developers but enough for us to test it in the field more broadly.
In Phase , extension browser will only contain extensions made by us (you’ll see PixiEditor and Pixi Labs in the Developer section). In other words, it’s not open for public extensions yet.
Throughout the whole phase 1, we’ll be adding free and paid extensions. It’s a part of our project funding strategy
Phase 2 - First public extensions
To even begin with Phase 2 at a capacity we have planned, we need to gather enough funding from extensions on Phase 1. Extensions are one of the biggest architectural challenges for the project and needs stable funding.
In phase 2, extensions SDK and ABI should be stable and provide minimum set of interactions with PixiEditor. Which includes things like an ability to create custom file parsers, accessing and editing the Node Graph, manipulating the layer tree and drawing capabilities.
This is a moment where we can open extension browser for other developers, likely to a limited and selected group of people.
At this point we’ll likely test developer portal for creating and publishing extensions.
Phase 3 - Open Extension Directory
Party day, everyone will have access to developer portal and will be able to publish their own extensions.
What about Steam? Are extensions available there too?
Steam is great, we all love Gaben. However there is a major problem. PixiEditor for Steam has completely separate authentication and “account” system from standalone one.
And for a good reason, Steam policy disallows selling outside of their shop, we even had to remove “Donate” button (that was opening PixiEditor’s Open Collective page) from the app.
Also this is why Founder’s Pack bought on PixiEditor’s website is not available in the Steam and vice versa.
For Phases 1 & 2, we’ll likely not introduce Extension Browser for Steam version. We’re considering using Steam Workshop for Steam version, but it brings another set of problems we need to consider.