[Suggestions] Interface niggles

Hi guys, just a few little niggles that I would love to have addressed...

1) Bookmarks bar: comments are displayed simply as "Comment" - I'd really appreciate it if these could actually display the comment text. Long story/motivation: I've become quite fond of using the bookmarks bar as a bug-hunting todo list, and I always mark my buggy events with a comment above it, but when I double click on an event in the bookmarks bar it takes me straight to it, with the event at the top of the screen, thus cutting off the comment. I have to then scroll up to see the comment, which is just a little bit of a pain.

2) Pasting conditions/actions: I often need to re-order code, duplicate actions or move them between events. Sometimes drag-and-drop is appropriate, other times copy/paste is appropriate. But every time I paste an action, it goes to the bottom of the event when that's not always what I want. I then have to manually drag it into place. If actions and conditions could be pasted directly below the currently selected action or condition, that would be a huge help.

3) Dragging sub-events. This is really minor. When dragging an event into the sub-event position, the X threshold required to make the little white bar click into place is inconsistent. This is due to it being set by the width of the condition column, which is often different for different events. If that threshold could be fixed, say, to this position, I'd be very happy:

<img src="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/14522925/Images/sub-event-dragging.png" border="0" />

Like I said, these really are niggles, but sure would be great if they could be addressed :)

+1

Agreed.

I agree with points 2 and 3. Especially 3 as this just drives me insane.

As far as 1 goes, I don't move away from bugs, I hit them as I go... I mean yesterday it took me nearly 7 hours to just figure one out and 'fix' it.. (check my latest thread and you'll understand.)

It's awesome to see that my first point was addressed, but I'm bumping this with a few more suggestions, although I hope the other two I mentioned in the first post aren't forgotten.

The first two are based on my experiences with 3DS Max. They're focused on speeding up and simplifying layout editing.

1) Object groups: Often I find myself creating slices of levels/puzzles as they come to me, and I later place them into the level as I see fit. This would be made 100 times easier if those objects could be grouped together and repositioned as a single object. This isn't an event/container thing, just a convenience thing in the layout view. I realise that box selection is the preferred method to deal with this, but it's not always suitable.

2) Lock/freeze individual objects: This would require a new object pane that would list all the locked objects, but it'd make it much easier when dealing with heavily layered layouts without having to lock entire layers.

Lastly, again this is a small niggle:

3) Comments above individual actions: I love my comments, and sometimes I have very lengthy events that become a bit visually muddled. If I could use comments within events as opposed to above them, it'd make organisation far easier and quicker.

Regarding 1), isn't that what selection wrapping does?

Ashley, Selection wrapping is fine for many situations, but having the ability to group together objects would make cloning and/or fine-tuning their position far easier. I'll give you a very specific example from my current project:

I create a set of objects, let's say a platform with a bunch of stuff on it, like this:

<img src="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/14522925/Images/Platform.jpg" border="0" />

If I ever want to repeat that collection of objects, I'll have to box select it all, but then I might end up selecting other objects around it, in the foreground, in the background, etc. (this loops back on the object locking suggestion). It becomes finicky to select/unselect all the extra bits and pieces. It'd be far easier if I could just click on one object and all other grouped objects are automatically selected.

Sorry, and I've got one more suggestion, something I've been thinking about for a while now.

A smart filter/search bar in the Project pane: I have lots of objects in my game, and I expect to have lots more. Even with my best efforts of sorting them into folders, it's sometimes a bit difficult to keep track of everything, and with more sub-folders it takes progressively more time to get to an object, even if I know where it is.

If we could have a search bar that filters the objects in the tree list as we type, that would make finding and placing objects considerably quicker.

<img src="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/14522925/Images/SearchBar.jpg" border="0" />

It'd be far easier if I could just click on one object and all other grouped objects are automatically selected.

Have you tried selecting one and pressing W?

I hadn't tried that before, I see that it automatically selects objects in a container (which is pretty darn handy in itself, so thanks for that). That's not really what I'm after, though, as putting objects into containers has a number of implications. This is more about simple layout convenience, rather than affecting the event- and ultimately game-changing properties of objects.