Feature Request: Editor: Room Editing: Objects: Live image resizing

[Joseph DiPerla]

Hey CJ. Sorry to bug you on this. But everytime I try to program my game and try to get the size of the characters and objects I have to keep restarting my game and going to the specific room to see how it looks.

Is there anyway we can do a "Place character in current room" Button where the character would be placed there to see it in contrast to the rest of the room?

Also, can we have object resizing as well on the screen?

For some reason I thought the editor supported this already. I just cant seem to find it in the manual or on the editor itself. So, if its already there, can someone point me to it? Thanks. If not, CJ, you think this can be an addition to the editor? At a minimum I would need the object resizer.

[GarageGothic]

Yeah, this would be a very convenient feature. In addition, could we perhaps get an Object.Scaling and Object.ManualScaling property, allowing them to scale independent of walkable areas, analogous to characters?

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Is there anyway we can do a "Place character in current room" Button where the character would be placed there to see it in contrast to the rest of the room?

Ok, I'm not CJ, but there are so many scripting elements (and even the game's res) that can change the appearance of the room, I'm not sure that would be truly useful. Anyway, one thing you could do is just place a temporary object which has your character's sprite, take a look around and then delete it when you're through.

BTW, what exactly is object resizing? In order to properly resize an object, wouldn't you have to change the graphic? Or if you'd rather, isn't it something you can do with the Raw functions? Just don't use an object, or use a dummy one while you RawDraw and RawResize.

[GarageGothic]

To make this kind of thing (object placement/area scaling factor) easier, you could also create a debug GUI that won't be available in the final game. This could tell you the coordinates and scale of the object and let you drag it around, as well as offer instant SetAreaScaling for experimenting.

I coded a similar interface to let me play around with the lighting and tint effects in-game.

[InCreator]

I support this idea.
Why should everyone invent their own bicycle if many people need it?

But I'll imagine this rather "test current room" instead of integrating a bit of game into AGS.

[RickJ]

I could see the usefulness of the editor resizing objects according to the area's  scale factor (provided of course, that object scaling is enabled) without having to "Run Test".  This would be helpful in accurately placing objects (such as doors, windows, etc) on the background image.   It would also be handy to have a character sprite that one could drag around the screen to see how the scaling looks.   

However, I don't really see the utility of being able to resize sprites in the game editor.  Object sprites should be either drawn relative to the character sprites (when object scaling is enabled) or relative to room's background image.   

[Joseph DiPerla]

The reason I ask this though is because I have certain objects that need to change in size after a certain puzzle.  But I dont want to keep running the game to see if the object resized well or not. I know there is a script to resize the object at run-time.

But maybe in the editor we can have an attributes setting where we can change its X size and Y Size and it would do it on screen for us so we see how it looks.

[Radiant]

As a workaround, you can quite easily make a debug option that moves characters to rooms.

[Joseph DiPerla]

Yeah, but I would still have to keep starting and restarting the game and editor to fix it until I got it right.

[Pumaman]

Yeah, this has been requested before and I can appreciate it would be useful. Having to position characters by X,Y co-ordinates at the moment is a bit of a pain and user un-friendly, so this is something I'd like to implement at some point.

[Joseph DiPerla]

Ok Thanks CJ.  But I was wondering for even just objects and resizing them when we add them to the room. Can we edit the size by just using the attributes window?

[Pumaman]

That would need this to be implemented:

Yeah, this would be a very convenient feature. In addition, could we perhaps get an Object.Scaling and Object.ManualScaling property, allowing them to scale independent of walkable areas, analogous to characters?

which is certainly a possibility for a future version.