Some really great extensions: A question for the developers

[merkvah]

As a long time user and dedicated lover of Fantasy Grounds, I've found several community made mods and extensions that I've added to my games... not modules, or game elements, but improvements to the function and look of Fantasy Grounds. For example, a new favorite of mine changes the colors of the banners on the right to make them easier to distinguish, so instead of telling a player "click on your backgrounds banner" and then waiting ten minutes while they hunt for it (if you've played pickup, you know what I mean), I can now say "Click on the brown Backgrounds banner," and since there are only 2 or 3 banners that could be considered brownish, it narrows it down considerably.

Another one is a combat timer that begins on each person's turn, and counts until they pass the turn. Very useful for showing players the value of being ready on their initiative!

Anyway, there are several fantastic extensions like that floating around... some cosmetic, some mechanical. Why doesn't Fantasy Grounds, or SmiteWorks proper, incorporate those into the main game? Is it for copyright issues? This could (I think) easily be solved by saying telling the players that whatever they develop for Fantasy Grounds is appreciated and may be incorporated into the main game. Blizzard is doing this quite frequently with World of Warcraft (incorporating player-made mods into the game) and we know how successful that is!

Anyway, there may be a good reason not to, one that you've thought of and I haven't, and if that's the case, I apologize for taking so much of your valuable time. You all are doing great work (Unity looks AMAZING, by the way!! ) and I am very, very grateful.

Many thanks.

[Zacchaeus]

There have been many extensions in the past which have been incorporated into the code; so it does happen.

[LordEntrails]

As said, it does happen but it does not happen with all community extensions for a couple of reasons;
1) SmiteWorks can not retroactively claim the right to use community code. They could do so for future community extensions shared on the forums, but that has problem too.
2) overhead. Every extension they incorporate increases the testing they need to do before a new release and makes the code harder to maintain and change.
3) if their is a working community extension, why incorporate it since their is already a working solution people can use if desired.
4) options overload. The more options the software has, the more some users will be intimidated by it and will be put off or feel the learning curve is too steep.

Directly commenting on the extensions you use. From a personal perspective:
I like the (current) themes icons, because I have a stable long term group of players I dont have a need for easily referable buttons. (But you have a perfect need for it). Pretty much the same with the combat timer. I dont need it, but you do!

[damned]

From what Ive seen....

SmiteWorks actually have stats on how often extensions are used for all games that use the alias system. So they know what extensions are actually regularly used.
SmiteWorks have their own internal roadmap or featuremap that they are working to. Ofc Im sure this evolves over time.
Code that is incorporated into core rulesets needs to be coded to the same standard and quality that existing code is which generally means that the code has to be written again from scratch or mostly so.
And on the topic of themes... that is probably they are probably most common extensions used - themes are very much a personal preference.

[merkvah]

Ok. =) thank you very much for your time. I appreciate the responses!