I love you
@YellowAfterlife. You are clearly very intelligent, but at the same time you blow my mind with your examples. Yes, you don't have access to that information at runtime, but you build the resources the game uses. You know whether or not a sprite is making use of a particular bounding box or alpha tolerance. In fact, building something to read the program data at runtime, while impressive, is like trying to solve an open window by building another house. You know the window is open, you just have to close it. GML doesn't
have to know about this because you you already do. I mean, yes, you can do it your way and I have no doubts the man who wrote a GML interpreter in GML would be able to, but like your other suggestions I have to ask: is that really the best, simplest or even most useful solution to the problem? Is it not easier to simply draw the sprite, know your alpha tolerance and draw conclusions from that? I'm guessing based on your answer that you say no, but like our previous discussion I can't see eye-to-eye with you on this.
It's either create an elaborate system to visualize a pixel perfect representation
or draw the sprite and use your own knowledge of how you set up your game to draw conclusions. If you need the other bounding box types, it is more difficult to draw an correct ellipse or rectangle for representation sure, but in those cases you could literally draw the bounding box you wanted as another sprite and use that as your mask. That's a lot simpler, especially if the only purpose for this code is testing. You are truly my favorite person posting. I know that feeling is hardly mutual, but it's like watching the world's smartest man suggest the best way to figure out if your car is in the garage is to build a network of sensors rather than just, you know, look in the garage. I well and truly love reading your posts.
Then again, I'm the only person who suggested this so maybe I've been doing it wrong.