DiegoM the whole new engine lol! Here is a listing of the key improvements compared with what I had 7 years ago that are helping me a ton:
-Scene graph! Back then I had to workaround a lot using containers and events to create composed objects at runtime. With the new object hierarchy this go so much smoother to do, and I can take a "prefab" approach to basically all of my components.
- Custom Actions. I tend to always visualize my objects as classes and create their custom actions depending on what they do. This lead me to cleaner code, more readable and better structured.
- Layer groups. I can optimize the effects cascading, organize better my scene and the objects on each layer.
- Sampling. Being able to configure it by layer, object or layout is much appreciated. I use to combine clean vector art with pixel-art. Back then it looked messy because of the sampling.
- Signaling. I can take an "event-listeners" approach for game-managers, player-managers and single objects, to allow other parts of the game to suscribe to specific events.
There's clearly more improvements, but these along with some plugins I developed using the new features of the SDK are turning the game into a cleaner project.