[REQUEST] Usability "basic" features, for beginners

[Relight]

I am a beginner with the latest version of AGS (3.2.1) but not new to AGS itself. I am a quick learner but it has been around 10 years since I've used it myself, so I did turn to the documentation to help me get going. With that in mind, there are a few things I thought I'd mention that either could be documented better (unless my skimming missed them) or that I thought could use some basic improvements in the editor that would be useful.

I can see it seems to be a tricky time for AGS with Chris no longer involved in development (?), critical | discussions (have you considered inviting some of the large groups that use AGS - Himalaya, Infamous Quests, Wadjet Eye, etc. - to a symposium to discuss these types of ideas?), and multiple | dev branches (?), which can't be good for the community in the long run, can they?

Onto my points:

1) I had forgotten that the AGS coordinate system starts at 0,0, which is fine if it is clearly explained in the scripting tutorial so that beginners understand it (although I didn't notice this, including the rationale and the scope - does it apply to Rooms only? to GUIs? to sprites? etc), but it is contrary to the idea that the top left pixel is 1,1 as per Photoshop for example and probably the rest of the world.

2) The ability to zoom in while working on GUIs in the Editor, just like with Rooms. This is critical, as monitors keep getting larger and GUIs and especially GUI elements can be small.

3) Centre GUIs vertically and horizontally in the Editor while working on them, as this makes it much easier to work on the edges. Or, at the very least, offset the GUI slightly from the edges of adjacent elements in the Editor.

4) A point of confusion for myself - how do those GUI handles work? The outer edge of the handle seems to be aligned to the outer edge of the GUI object, but in that case my objects (same height as my GUI) weren't fitting on the GUI like they should. I was working with transparent edges on my objects so that was also making it tricky. A corner piece (1 pixel line sitting on top of the outer edge of the object extending down both sides from the corner) would be possibly easier to understand than the pixel blocks currently used, in my opinion.

5) "Duplicate" function - duplicate GUI, duplicate Room, etc. This would be a nice and fast way to copy something, rather than the extra steps of exporting and importing, or the extra step of creating a template Room for example if it's not something you really need to template, if you only need 1 copy.

I think that's it for now!

[Khris]

While I mostly agree with the other points, 1) is completely off base. Every single graphics program, programming language and engine I've ever used starts counting at 0 and considers the top left pixel to have the coordinates 0,0. There's one exception so far (Lua?) where an array's first element has the index 1, but as far as pixels go, nowhere the world over, including Photoshop, is 1,1 used.

[Relight]

Hmmm... you're totally right, and I'm not sure how I mistakenly got into that impression. To explain a bit more clearly, for some reason I always thought that Photoshop reported pixels by rows/columns, as if the top left pixel would be 1,1 because that pixel occupies the space of the first column and first row of pixels, rather than reporting by the top left alignment of its position. I was wrong! I do use Photoshop and InDesign etc. quite a bit but it's been ages since I've done pixel work. It doesn't make sense for pixels to be treated differently than any other unit of measurement, but I guess I always thought of pixels more like the rows and columns in a spreadsheet... in a spreadsheet, your top left cell is A1, not A0. Right?

Anyway, I hope that explanation somewhat covers for my momentary senility

[Dave Gilbert]

RELIGHT!

Long time no see!

Nothing to add, really. Just cool to see you again, as it were.