Create a plugin system to enable developers to expand Mantle in creative ways

[blake-mealey]

Mantle could enable developers to expand functionality by supporting a plugin system. Some feature ideas I have had don't seem like they should be included in the core tool. However, they could be implemented as plugins that can be optionally installed if users want those features.

Some ideas for plugins:

• Convert file formats of assets automatically before upload (e.g. wav to mp3 for audio assets) consider file conversions #61
• Provide tips on Roblox best practices for assets and images (e.g. thumbnail file dimensions). Kind of like a linter add best practices tips for resources #60
• Detect when a resource was affected by Roblox's text moderation handle roblox text moderation #26
• We could implement some of Tarmac's features with this: image packing and hi-res versions

[blake-mealey]

I think the nicest way to implement plugins would be to provide a hooks API for plugins written in an interpreted language that would be called at various stages of the resolution process.

The most obvious language choice is Lua since that's what the Roblox community is familiar with.

Some hooks that the plugins would need access to in order to implement the above ideas:

• Reading files from disk and transforming their contents
• Knowing what files will be used for when reading from disk
• Viewing the created resources in Roblox

Something we could consider is letting plugins implement new resource types. However, this would require opening up the config file for extensions and would move some of the core logic of managing resources outside of Rust which reduces safety and security. For example, should the plugins be given direct access to the roblosecurity cookie? Probably not.

[blake-mealey]

Some of these plugins could be built as "official" plugins.

Something to keep in mind here is they need to be easy to install. And, they need to be able to include dependencies (nobody is going to implement a wav to mp3 plugin if they can't import a wav to mp3 Lua library).

[blake-mealey]

A simpler first iteration of this would be to just call configured commands at certain hooks

[blake-mealey]

This could be a cool way to implement this: https://extism.org/

Also would be cool to have Lua support for this. Maybe the Roblox OSS discord could take a stab at it.