Converter repository & automatic detection

[Frooxius]

At the moment, the SDK contains converters only for common built-in Unity components. However one of the goals is for the SDK to be expanded by the community, to allow converting common components from other SDK's and systems.

In the current state, that requires the user to find and install those converters manually, which provides more friction to the user.

We should likely avoid including too many converters as part of this SDK directly, since it will cause bloat and create dependency on those other SDK's. E.g. converters for VRCFury components should probably not be shipped as part of the default repo / install, but added on top of the SDK.

To improve this workflow, we could introduce some sort of "converter repository" - a way to submit additional converters with metadata. This would allow:

• Browsing & installing converters from within the Unity SDK UI, rather than searching GitHub manually
• The SDK could recommend converters to install based on components it finds in the scene - e.g. if it detects user has VRCFury components, it can recommend to install converter for this

Technical implementation

There are a few ways we could approach this problem:

• Molecule
  • It would require this to be implemented first
  • We'll need to implement some custom behaviors & metadata for this
• GitHub repo search
  • If converter is a GitHub repository, it could be tagged with specific tag that would make this system pick it up
  • Part of repo can contain "manifest" file which will contain the metadata
  • However this creates dependency on GitHub for publishing the converters
  • This might be easier/faster to implement
  • GitHub has system for starring repositories

Security

Also one potential challenge with this is security. Since the converters are custom 3rd party code, this code can potentially be malicious.

• We would likely need to at least warn the user that they are installing 3rd party code
• We could have a system for vetting common converters (either by trusted community members or us)