[REQUEST] Organize content in to groups inside the IDE

It is a pretty old topic. Have been requested for a very long time but up until now I was able to manage it without it because I was working on small projects mostly.

This time I’m working on a huge project in GDevelop. It is a sandbox game where the player can freely wonder around in the world and interact with certain things and use tools. The problem I’m facing is that when the player using a tool, I don’t want to stop the gameplay. I want the game to continue to run in the background while the player is using the tool, so putting the layout of the tools on a separated scene is not an option. What I decided to do and the only way to go about this is to put the tools on to external layouts and then when the game starts it will create the tools screen from external layout on layers and then when the player uses the tool I simply display the layer.

The problem is, in the game there are many different tools and the player may not going to use and need all of them but I have no way to know that, It is a sandbox game, the player can do whatever he or she want. To be able to allow that, I have no choice but to include all the objects, every single one of them for every single scene and it is lead me to have hundreds if not thousand of objects for each scene and there is no way to organize this in GD5.

Also the external layout, as I mentioned there are many different tools, many layouts and also scenes. It is a huge game so I do divide the game world in to scenes and I have a lot of them and again I have no way to group them to make it more tidy.

So what I would like to have is the possibility to group content and able to fold unfold the groups:

SCENES:
World1
–Sector1
------area1
------area2
–Sector2
------area3
------area4

LAYOUTS:
ToolGroup1
–tooltype1
–tooltype2
ToolGroup2
–tooltype3
–tooltype4

OBJECTS:
World
–object1
–.
–.
–object789
ToolGroup1
–ToolType1
—object790
—…
—…
—object850

And to be able to fold-unfold this to keep everything organized and tidy. You may notice the numbering I used, it is not important to be able to name the objects the same inside different groups. It ok if I need to name all and every single object different but I want to be able to group them and fold-unfold the groups so I don’t need to scroll through hundreds of them to find 1. But in case it would be done so I can name content the same inside different groups that would not hurt of course.

And the same for the resources editor.
Able to group resources like in GD4 but I think it would be also nice to be able to replace resources. Imagine you have been using an image in animation of 100 objects and suddenly you want to change either the location or name of the image inside the project folder or you want to replace the image with a different one. Then you need to go and do it for each 100 objects 1 by 1. It would be nice to be ale to replace resources in the resources editor and GD would automatically go ahead, find all the objects been using the old resource and replace it with the new one we choose so we don’t need to do it manually.

Feel free to add any ideas or share any opinion about this.

One solution that always comes up is to name the scene and objects with a path in the name like World1_Sector1_Area1, but the point is, when you have so many items it is just become a pain to scroll through them all to find 1 in the middle somewhere.

Thanks in advance.

4ian kindly has create ticket for this on the roadmap:
Scenes/Layouts/Events
trello.com/c/Z2fn5lMs/201-allow … to-folders
Objects
trello.com/c/S6Li72db/202-allow … ganisation

In case you agree it would be important, please vote for the feature on the roadmap to be added.

+1 Voted! I really like this idea and have been thinking similarly as my game continues to grow.