Feature Req: Scroll Wheel and goto next layout

I have been using C2 heavily for the last year and there are a couple of issues I keep running into that I would like to flag as possible feature requests:

• When using the mouse wheel in the layout window, the default action is to scroll the layout up and down. This is fine for a web browser, but I feel that it is fairly useless in the layout editor and the sprite editor.

The default should be a zoom function. Currently to do this, you have to click in the layout to make sure it is focused on this window and then hold ctrl to mousewheel zoom in. Doing this becomes quite tedious when you have to do it a hundred times a day. Please at least give the option to zoom by default in the preferences!

• I would love to see a "goto next layout" and "goto previous layout" as system actions. This would look at the order of the layouts in the project window and go to the next/previous one. Then it is a matter of shuffling the order of your layouts in the project window to change level order , rather than fiddling with event sheets.

I often have 50 levels plus in a game, and am continually changing the order of levels via event sheets or using a dummy sprite object with an instance "next level" variable. Whilst this works fine, it can get very clumsy.

or using a dummy sprite object with an instance "next level" variable.This is indeed not very practical. Never heard of global variables? I know they are considered bad practice by some, and I agree you must try to minimize their use, but in that case it would be a lot easier.

If you name your layouts like this:

level 1

level 2

level 3

...

You could use the action "Goto layout (by name)" with these two expressions to go next/previous:

for Next Layout:

"level "& int(mid(LayoutName, 6, 3))+1

"level "& int(mid(LayoutName, 6, 3))-1

Thanks R0J0hound, that is actually a very elegant solution! Although it means that I have to be very clean in my level naming. If I had 20 levels named 1-20 and then decided to add 2 extra ones in the middle, there is a lot of renaming. Still it is a good option to know <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

The way I have been doing it, is to have a dummy level variable sprite with an instance variable called "next level" . The master event sheet then just calls this variable at the end of a level. The advantage of this is that you don't need a separate event sheet for each level and the level order can be changed in the layout view. I tend to store several level specific variables in this dummy sprite and it works quite well.

I still like the idea of shuffling level order in a list which is how I usually do it in Gamemaker, but I can live with this.

Is anyone else frustrated with the default scrollwheel behaviour?

I think I am about to get use to it. I would still prefer the mouse scroll to zoom directly though, or the option to do so.

The thing that I am terrified is the habit of zooming with alt+scroll wheel as in Photoshop, in C2 this can cause unexpected crashes...<img src="smileys/smiley19.gif" border="0" align="middle" />