Discussion My Suggestions

[GerPronouncedGrr]

Overall I'm really enjoying the new GMS; I think GMS2 is a much tighter experience than 1.x, and overall I already feel much more comfortable in it. This thread is just going to be my scattershot suggestions, basically anything that comes to mind that I would like to be able to do or change, given the opportunity. I will be adding to it throughout the beta. I will attempt to keep it organised insofar as the forum tools allow. Additionally, I realise that not everything is possible, at least not immediately, so this is just for discussion. Feel free to comment if you like.

[Sprite Editor]

• Convert to Frames: A readily accessible button to convert a sprite into frames. Perhaps even a right-click-in-resource-tree context item for it. Not a big deal, but saves time for an action that will likely be repeated many, many times. Workflow would be: Import, right-click > Convert to Frames, and bam! you're in the frames editor. Much faster than current workflow (Import, Open Sprite, Edit Sprite, Image > Convert to Frames).
• Value Sliders: When converting spritesheets that contain large amounts of frames (I just did one that contains 284 tiles), it would be helpful to be able to click-drag on input fields to quickly increase or decrease the values. Currently, we either have to know the exact values, trial & error typing in exact values, or click-click-click-click-click dozens of times to get the numbers right.

[Tileset Editor]

• Manual Grid Slicing: For spritesheets that have empty space in them it would be nice to be able to exclude that space, and for spritesheets that have non-uniform spacing between sets of tiles it would be convenient to be able to ignore that space and move on to the next set of sprites within that sheet.

[Brush Creator]

• Random Brush: Ideally you would simply create a brush as normal, then set it to be a randomised brush. Then, when painting with this brush, it will paint a single tile, choosing from among the tiles included in the brush. For example, say you're creating a field of grass, and you have some variation tiles. One of these has a yellow flower, another has a red flower, another has some coarse tufts of grass, etc. You get the idea. Well, you put all these variations into a brush, and the brush randomly chooses which tile to paint whenever it paints. Pie-in-the-sky addition to this would be the ability to assign weights to each tile within the random brush, so that some items occur more or less frequently. This type of tool is super useful for quickly adding non-uniform detail to environments.

 

[GerPronouncedGrr]

New entries appear in red.

 

[Drumble]

Convert to Frames: A readily accessible button to convert a sprite into frames. Perhaps even a right-click-in-resource-tree context item for it. Not a big deal, but saves time for an action that will likely be repeated many, many times. Workflow would be: Import, right-click > Convert to Frames, and bam! you're in the frames editor. Much faster than current workflow (Import, Open Sprite, Edit Sprite, Image > Convert to Frames).

THANK YOU. I was looking for that way too long earlier. Which just highlights the need of a better workflow all the more. Very buried at the moment.

Agreed with all the rest too.

 

[Mike]

Manual Grid Slicing: Not gonna happen....
Random Brush: we have some ideas along this line already.

As to value sliders.... if your converting frames, you should know. Unless you want to "auto" work it out as a grid based on cell size? (so just MAX row*columns)

 

[GerPronouncedGrr]

Manual Grid Slicing: Not gonna happen....
Random Brush: we have some ideas along this line already.

As to value sliders.... if your converting frames, you should know. Unless you want to "auto" work it out as a grid based on cell size? (so just MAX row*columns)

Thanks for your reply Mike. Glad to hear the random brush is being looked at! Manual slicing I can live without, though I have found it useful in *cough* other engines *cough*

As for the value sliders, this comes from the perspective of someone who habitually uses free assets that have been put together by people I am not in contact with, which is a situation I think many of your users can probably identify with. I'm not saying I can't figure it out and enter the numbers manually. just that it would be a lot more convenient to be able to import a sheet, then quickly drag out sliders to get the lines in place. Then the buttons can be used for single-pixel precision.

Any thoughts on the Convert to Frames workflow?

 

[Mike]

Not especially.... I do it a lot too, but I don't think you do it so much that you need this. You'll add images every now and then. It's not like you'll spend 5 hours at a time pasting in assets and converting them to sprites. You'll load in a few, do some code/levels load some more etc. I don't see it as a huge issue. Not saying no... but waaaay down the list