As far as I can see, the current method of updating a plugin is to publish the update, save the progress on the current plugin code, close the place, open the plugin management window/refresh the page (if it’s already open), wait for the page to load, update the plugin, navigate to the place file (admittedly easier with the ‘game’ view on in studio) and re-launch the place.
All to find out that I’ve accidentally misspelled print as pritn on line 45.
I’m currently working on a plugin in studio that requires lots of minute tweaks, adding and changing only a few lines of code at a time.
Would it be possible to alter the way that plugins work, in such a way that allows us to right-click on a plugin and be able to have a “Refresh this plugin” and a “Search for update” option? Rather than closing studio, it just automatically closes, searches for the update, finds an update, installs, and relaunches the plugin, printing whether or not it has updated to a new version. I also can’t tell you the amount of times I had to close studio while using the official animator to reset the plugin. This would have made those bugs significantly less annoying.
An immediate issue with the proposal is that not all of a plugin’s code is optimized to cease when it is disabled, which in fairness on my part, should. An easy soloution to this would be to create an addition to the plugin api, ForceCease, which fires an event to the plugin if its active. It would require a little more coding on the developer’s side to use but I think this QoL addition outweighs that amount of time.