Reference Collections through "Package References"

[CarsonKompon]

For?

S&Box

What can't you do?

Specify a collection in the following window:

How would you like it to work?

I would like to be able to enter a full collection such as garry.greenthings or facepunch.sboxassets and have it crawl for all the addons in the collections.

It would also be nice if collections of collections could work but I can definitely see that being tricky (especially if a collection has a collection which inside contains the first collection)

What have you tried?

I have tried specifying a collection in the window screenshotted above and it would hang S&box to download all of the content within the collection and then meet me with this empty error with two warning I can't click into, so not sure if it's a bug or a feature request anymore 😅

Additional context

No response

[garrynewman]

What's the use case?

[yuberee]

Well for one you can add multiple models to your game all at once with a collection, I can see a lot of games that need that like Sandbox, Flood, etc... For example if you have a fishing game you just add the collection fish.fishes which has all of our fish models, instead of adding each one manually. Though now that I think about it, there's no way to stop the creator of such collection to add an addon to it when people use it just for the assets.

[TheBoxTrot]

Cant you load the models in code from assetparty ?. that way your only using models you actually use and not a collection that could have bloat

[yuberee]

Cant you load the models in code from assetparty ?. that way your only using models you actually use and not a collection that could have bloat

While the prospect of downloading the fish model the moment you grapple it out of the water is amusing, I don't think it would make for a good gaming experience to wait 2-5 seconds for it to render in your world.

[CarsonKompon]

The main use case I was thinking of is ease-of-sharing for the same reason ubre is. It's very tedious if you know your game is going to use every model in a certain collection to add each one individually by ident instead of being able to enter the ident of one collection.

Maybe what I'm actually asking for is a proper UI that allows you to select a package from asset.party (instead of typing an ident), and if a collection is selected, it adds everything from that collection to the list instead of just adding the collection, meaning you could pick-and-choose what you want from there.

[TheBoxTrot]

Cant you load the models in code from assetparty ?. that way your only using models you actually use and not a collection that could have bloat

While the prospect of downloading the fish model the moment you grapple it out of the water is amusing, I don't think it would make for a good gaming experience to wait 2-5 seconds for it to render in your world.

No I mean there's an option to precache the models too isnt there?

[yuberee]

At the end of the day you'd still need to write down the entire list.