Context menus

Context menus play a large part in the development process, and are supposed to contain commonly used and time saving commands.

Therefore before 1.0 I'm going to try and cover every context menu and make sure it has everything that's needed, and obviously, I'll need some input for this .

The first two are the new Object Bar context menu (which I'm working on now), and the animator frames context menu:

<img src="http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/7364/menuskz3.png">

The first may need some explanation. Show small icons (horizontal) is for when the bar is docked horizontally (top or bottom). Show object tree is for the new object folder organisation system. I've also added a few things to the animator frames context menu, but there's probably more useful things to be done with both.

[quote:2dwjolxw]Show object tree is for the new object folder organisation system

so finally there gonna be a folder for objects??

for the Object Bar maybe "sort by category" (games, graphics, controlls...) - properties for objects like "mouse & keyboard", "Image Manipulator" or "xaudio" don't need changes all the time - so sending them to end of list could let user to focus more on sprites or particles

and for the animator frames you could add "duplicate frame" - it's faster then copy/paste and maybe "export frame" just a thought

Yeah, it's explained a little better here:

Sorting objects by category would be rather arbitrary; how would the user realistically know when the category was a new one? I think maybe a checkbox to hide non-layout objects (like the ones you mentioned) may be useful though.

I've added duplicate frames.

agree

checkbox to hide non-layout objects would be perfect for that

OK, that's added.

I've updated the screen grabs at the top to show the new items.

i'm still thinking about this categories...i could be nice to sort all sprite objects to sprite, text to text...

but to be honest you could always make new folder calld Sprites and put all sprites to that folder, same with other objects.....so nevermind

what did you say about sth like export animation to sprite sheet? save current animation as one image files and then import again as a tileset.

it can save some time with when you have 20 frames of your hero walking and you want to change only his pants colour...it's horror

I guess that could be done yeah; I'll do it soon.

while you're at it, do you think that 'Duplicate Frames' could also be done by Ctrl-Dragging an animation frame, similar to the duplication of layout objects? that would make this operation even more comfortable than right-and-left-clicking :)

How will the object tree work? Will there be an additional menu item to "Create new folder" or some such? Also, I suppose "Delete folder" and "Empty contents" (from folder, and dump them in the root) would be handy to have. And perhaps "Expand/collapse all"

Don't know if I'm getting ahead of myself here, though.

Would be cool if we could simply select a couple of objects and press CTRL + G to put them into a folder. That's how you put layers into a folder in Photoshop or group objects together in Maya - would feel pretty natural.

To follow deadeyes thought: If nothing is selected and I RMB - create new folder, I'd have a clean, empty folder. If objects are selected and I RMB - create new folder, the selected objects should directly go into the folder.

A little streamlining goes a loooong way into making the app easier to work with

Um I have a little suggestion. How about a category for layers?

Its kinda hard some times to tell whats on what layer.

A category..?

I was thinking about adding a 'description' field to layouts, layers and objects, so you could better describe their purposes for your own or a fellow developers benefit. Would that be beneficial?

I was just thinking something to to separate the objects in the object dialog by layers.

Like

Layer 1:

sprite

sprite2

Layer 3:

Sprite3

sprite4

Well, presumably you can just make a folder called "Layer 1," then Ctrl-click the layer to select all the objects, and stick them in the folder...?

Though maybe a separate "Sort by layer" would be handy.

Then again, sort by create time, sort by size, sort by birthday, sort by favorite Beatle, sort by whatever would all probably be handy at one time or another.

Sort by Z-Order kinda does what Sort by Layer would already. Adding text labels into the list would minimise the effectiveness of the bar, as it's already quite crowded.