Creator 2.0 Questions

jamie_c

With all my spare time during our shutdown I've decided to re-build one of my game using the online version of creator. I'm bumping up agains some questions that I can't seem to find answers to online anywhere, there is not a lot of info on Creator 2.0 out there yet it seems, so I'm going to ask here. I'm sure it's going to mostly be small stuff, but we'll see.

First, for the Animate Behavior. Does the 'Store current frame in:' section work? It doesn't seem to be for me at the moment.

Second, I thought I had read at one point that you could use grids and guides, but I can't seem to find that anywhere. Is that a feature?

adent42

No grids and guides yet (that's something that's easier to add in the HTML5 creator, but we just haven't done it).

I'll look into the Animate Behavior's Store Current Frame thing. It should work, but there are some things we have't tested well since we don't use them in our edu projects.

jamie_c

Got it. thanks for letting me know. I'm sure I'll have more questions as I use it more. :)

jamie_c

Is there any way to constrain movement while dragging and actor on the stage? Like holding the shift key down? Nothing seems to work for me.

Is there a way to copy/duplicate an actor in the Actors Library? It seems like if I use the 'copy to clipboard' button it will work sometimes, but not always. And if I'm copying more than one in a row, it will often paste the previous actor instead of the one I just copied. If that is supposed to be how you duplicate an actor it seems super buggy.

So this doesn't seem like a list of complaints, some things I really like so far are the actor attributes being available right on the stage (coming from the mac version this is super nice!). Also I learned by watching a couple of the very few videos available online that you can search for Behaviors right in the logic stack so you don't have to drag them from the Library all time, this is great!

adent42

@jamie_c

Shift will constrain for resize, but not for movement, good note to add.

Actors. Sounds like it's a bit laggy, we'll look into it.

Thanks for the feedback! There are quite a few known issues we need to work on, but there are also new ones based on people using GameSalad in unexpected ways that we'll be looking forward to addressing!

jamie_c

@adent42, thanks for the tip about Shift for resize, I'll have to try that out. I was thinking it 'felt' like the copy issue might be laggy because after pressing the 'copy to clipboard' button just once I'd see the message about copying pop up several times in the lower left corner of the screen. The copying of Scenes however works perfect every time so that is a plus. :)

jamie_c

@adent42, I have a custom collision shape that works as expected in the Mac version of Gamesalad but does not load into the online version. Is this something that is still in the works in the online version or should it be working correctly?

I see that I can do an auto trace in the online version, and that does work okay. It would be great if I could manually adjust the points once it's done the auto trace though.

adent42

@jamie_c I was just about to head here to tell you about the auto-trace! We wanted to keep it simple, so no adjustments (yet). I figured that if you wanted to customize, you can use a proper tool for it. I want to make light collision shape editor in the future. PM me your shape file and I'll try to see what's up. It should work.

adent42

@jamie_c another thing to note is that copy paste should work cross project and it will ask you if you'd like to create any missing attributes (or use an existing attribute).

That should be handy for copying logic between games.

jamie_c

https://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/comment/613678#Comment_613678

That's very cool, I'll have to try that out. I hadn't come across that yet. Thanks for the tip.

jamie_c

https://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/comment/613677#Comment_613677

@adent42, I created a new project and new shape from scratch this morning and everything worked as expected this time. Hopefully it was just a hick-up last time. :)

jamie_c

https://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/comment/613678#Comment_613678

Hi @adent42, I gave this a try and it did work as described, however at first I thought it didn't work. See the attached screen shot, the Attribute Browsers are in different order and at first I didn't think the Attributes pasted in with the new actor. Just threw me for a loop for a second. I'm pretty sure I've seen those controls on the right in different order at different times which is a little disorienting. I imagine this is a known bug?

It's a nice feature though, I can see it coming in handy. I only tried the copy and paste between projects with actors. Does it work with scenes as well?

jamie_c

@adent42, after creating a project and the video over view I have some observations/thoughts on Creator 2.0. It's a pretty long list I guess, but most of it is 'would be nice' stuff.

Bugs?

- Duplicating an actor with the “Copy to Clipboard” button never works for me.

- Pasted behaviors paste in reverse order.

- The Attribute Inspector seems to randomly re-order sometimes.

General Questions:

- What does the “Enter Edit Multiple” button do in the various libraries?

- Is there any way to pull an image or sound back out of a project? I used to do this with the Mac version and it saved my butt a few times when I had otherwise lost the item.

- When previewing a project, what does the “Clear Local Storage” button do?

- When you copy/paste behaviors they always paste open, can they paste collapsed or even in the state they were copied in?

- Should the ear icon next to a sound file play that sound? It doesn't.

Would be nice:

- To be able to have grids, guides and snap.

- If the ‘Copy Scene’ button just duplicated the scene and you didn’t need to press command-v to paste. 

- To be able to save Viewport Tools settings in a custom drop down menu. Or at least set the existing menus once and they stayed that way until you change them again. I found myself having to choose the same zoom levels and orientation over and over again.

- If immediately after adding a Behavior the first input box was focused so you could begin typing without first having to select the box.

- If there were a keyboard command (enter, or tab or something) that would open the attributes browser and/or expression editor if the cursor were in a field where it was an option.

- If you could just type T or F once you have activated the pull down menu for a boolean attribute in a behavior. In general it would be nice if the drop down menus could be typed in too active a selection. For example in a Display Text, if you active the font menu and start typing Tinos, it would be selected without having to drag to it.

- To be able to preview an animation from the Animation Behavior. Either in the behavior itself or maybe in the actors preview.

- To include other color picker options, CMYK, HSB, etc.

- To be able to manually re-order actors like you can layers in the layers pallet. 

- To be able to add folders/categories to actors as well that can be opened and collapsed like you handle behaviors now.

- To be able to manually re-order custom attribute lists and also use collapsable category heads for them as well.

- To have an easier way to save a project to a local hard drive.

- To have a modifier key to constrain the axis when dragging an actor on stage.

- To have a more robust zoom feature:

Manually enter a zoom value

Use a modifier key and +/- to zoom

Use a modifier key and the mouse scroll wheel to zoom

Have an icon or keyboard command to quickly return to 100%

- When using the search for a behavior box, allow the arrow keys to scroll the list of behaviors up if there are more than six. Now if I search for Move, for example, it is below the bottom of the screen and when I use the arrow key to move the selection down, the list does not scroll up when the selection moves below the screen.

- In a Rule, remove the default condition of ‘this actor receives event’. I think it would be better to not have to delete it every time you don’t need it. Just focus the search box immediately.

adent42

Those are indeed bugs, we'll add them to the work list.

Answers:

• Enter Edit Multiple - that lets you bulk delete (I should take off the "Enter" i think). In the future I'd also like that button to turn the actor labels into fields you can tab through them to mass edit (for instance, if you wanted to rename a bunch of actors at once).
• Clear Local Storage - clears out the data stored by Save Attribute and Save Table.
• I like pasting in previous state, I might not want the pasted closed if i want to be able to start ending right away.
• It does not. For the media assets I want to create an editor pane view that lets you view the assets full size. So images would let you see the full image (maybe even do some light editing). Same with sound. So instead of playing them clicking would open a waveform view or something like that and let you do some simple edits like cutting, speed, volume, pitch adjustment, etc.

Would Be Nice Comments:

• Copy scene can't just auto-duplicate because you might want to copy a scene to another project. Though adding another button to do that like "Duplicate Scene" and renaming "Copy" to "Copy to Clipboard" would be cool.
• Animate Behavior does have a preview. The play button to the left of the image list. It even real-time updates as you adjust speed.
• Actor re-order is oft requested. For now you can adjust the sorting with the dropdown.
• Tags will eventually show up as collapsible dividers in the actor browser. That should work for the idea of folders.
• The attribute list is tricky because JSON attributes have no guaranteed concept of order (also why they sometimes randomly re-order). XML does, which is why it works for our current tool. I think, after we finish the tool, we'll need to augment the format to include a data structure for attribute order. For now, the search box in the attribute pane should help with that, as you can quickly find attributes by name.
• Local Hard Drive Storage - It's a bit convoluted right now, but you can publish your game and then download from the publishing page. You can import published games later. The format for this creator is a bit different than the one used by the native engine and tools. What I want to do is allow for local save once everyone is on the same tool. (Though it will definitely out before then, as it is necessary for the desktop wrapped version of this tool).
• For the Rule Behavior, I think I might move back to the mac creator way of doing things and just use a dropdown to let you fix it. Having nothing there is confusing to new users. But having a default one is annoying if it's not the right one. So having one that's easy to change is the best solution i think.

I rushed through this, but if I didn't comment then I probably agree or we already have something in the To Do list.

Thanks for the feedback, this is awesome!

adent42

@jamie_c for copy/paste of scenes I'm not 100% sure. I started the code, but forgot if I finished (I'll try it in a bit). The tricky part is that you also have to pull all of the actors and prototypes with you as well! So I started down that path and I think I finished, but it may also be buggy as we rarely use the feature.

Copy pasting scenes is kind of bear UI wise as we will ask the user for each actor and attribute whether they want to paste from the source project or rewire to used existing values from the project

jamie_c

@adent42, thanks for all the info above. I'm really glad to see the preview in the animation behavior, I had totally missed it and reverting the rule selection to like the Mac version probably makes the most sense.

I did leave one thing off the bugs list until I got my latest video posted because there is an example of it happening in there so you can actually see it. It's with the loading of a custom collision shape, sometimes they work fine and other times I get what you see in the video. If you'd prefer I can explain in text but it's probably most informative to watch, its only a minute or two out of the whole video. The link below is cued up to the spot where it happens.

https://youtu.be/ZwVUMMPUbiI?list=PL3EyGmfc73E0fEuVvy0g8vQ55wcmwyq4A&t=79

adent42

I saw that! (I've been keeping up with your videos. I even used it to show one of our original founders where the current web creator is)!

jamie_c

Cool. Let me know if you need any other info about the bug then.