Some thoughts regarding Gdevelop

I am a special needs teacher and I develop accessible software for my students using different game engines… I was asked to teach other teachers on how to do this and after realizing that most of the other teachers wouldn’t be able to become proficient enough in coding I looked into Gdevelop and at the beginning it seemed the easiest solution… but as I look more in depth into the engine I see some deterrents… which make me ask if the following will be implemented in the near future… the video object doesn’t seem to allow you to choose a video or link at runtime, like having a open file dialog box; the ability to send commands to the command line (or at least I can’t figure it out), the tiled sprite object doesn’t let you swap images at runtime… the text to speech object doesn’t let you get a list of all available voices, and the voice recognition is not clear if it using the os inbuilt engine (like SAPI 5 in windows, which would be cool)… I’ve posted about some of these on discord and the forums, but not a single answer… if I am mistaken about this or I missed something about the engine please let me know. Regards

Hello! I will try to add context where I can.

If you mean like the windows command prompt or powershell, this is correct. most game engines do not interact with the command line in any way, and javascript as a language cannot at all as it run in a browser or browser based tech which is explicitly restricted from accessing system function such as the command line or registry.

That is accurate. The objects in general (not just video) do not support interacting with the system level dialogs (open file windows) for changing their resources at runtime. There are some ways to change a sprite resource after runtime via direct JavaScript, but it is very specific and will not normally launch a dialog box.

There is no text to speech object in the engine. If you mean some form of community made extension, that isn’t part of the engine. Extensions are included in the extension list after review that they don’t break anything, but do not have an assumption of support with the engine.

Usually only the developer of that extension would be able to give you guidance. That said, since GDevelop 5 uses JavaScript, and games are run either in a browser or electron (which is chromium) my bet is it uses the web browser speech synthesis tech (web speech), which would be OS agnostic. That is just an assumption however.