The most notable change in the Object Editor is that sub-windows are “chained” to the main form, in what YoYoGames is calling “Chain view”.
The idea is that different parts of the Object editor should all be visible, not overlap each other, connected visually.
The main Object window shows the object’s basic properties: the Name, Sprite, Collision mask, and Visible/Solid/Persistent/Physics properties, as you can see. Chained to it are the object’s Events, and the Code Editor (or DnD Editor) will be chained off of the Events sub-panel. If your object happens to be a Physics object, or has Parents or is a Parent, then the Parent and Physics sub-panels will also chain themselves to the main Object editor form.
This takes some getting used to, and occupies quite a lot of space on screen, which for users with smaller displays can make it a problem to work with Objects inside of a Workspace.
Fortunately, Object Editor windows, like any other window, can be broken out of the main GMS2 window and maximized, to fill up the entire screen if desired. Users will either love or hate Workspaces and Chain View windows, and if you’re one of the ones who hates them, you’ll need to get used to breaking the editor out into its own window and maximizing it, as this seems to be your only recourse for now. There’s a few Preferences in the Text Editors section that will make this easier for you, should you want to configure them:
The GameMaker Community Forums have been very active in discussing the UX issues created by the new UI, though, so don’t be surprised if YYG do make a few changes in future updates.
DnD or GML?
The Object Editor comes in two flavors: Drag-n-Drop (DnD) and Code Editor (GML). Which variant you get is currently determined when you create a new Project, but you can switch at any time. Most users will probably prefer to create GML projects and work in the code editor, but beginners, younger users, and non-programmers may prefer the DnD option.
Probably the most important feature of either variant is its interface for defining actions in your Object’s events.
I’ll be focusing mainly on the GML version, since that’s what advanced users will use. But briefly, Drag-n-Drop has been completely overhauled in GMS2.
The new Drag-n-Drop system
Vastly expanded in GMS2, there are now DnD equivalents to just about every function in GML. Unfortunately, this means that there are vastly more icons needed to represent all of these new DnD actions, making them harder to learn. Similar to Chinese or Japanese, where every written word has its own symbol, there’s a DnD icon for every GML function. While it’s reasonably easy to pick up a DnD library with a small number of actions, this quickly becomes unwieldy as the number of actions grows. Unfortunately I expect this will have the undesired effect of making DnD too complex to use for beginners and non-programmers, making it questionable how valuable the DnD system will be in the future. Learning to code by typing out instructions isn’t that hard, and is arguably the better way to learn in the first place. But it’s nevertheless true that for certain people, they feel intimidated by programming or typing, and an intermediary step of using DnD like “training wheels” until the new user has an understanding of GameMaker’s fundamentals and is ready to move on to GML, has been one of GameMaker’s defining features.
In GMS1.x and earlier, DnD Actions were iconographic representations of special GML functions that started with action_ for example, action_set_hspeed(number)
. These functions were mostly redundant, being equivalent to other GML functions and expressions, for example hspeed = number;
The action_ GML functions are obsolete in GMS2, and are no longer needed. DnD Actions can convert directly into GML with a single menu command. This is a one-way conversion, and should help users who want to “graduate” from DnD programming to GML programming. Formerly, in previous versions of GameMaker, there was no way to convert DnD to GML code, other than to manually re-write everything. If you try to convert GML into DnD, rather than a sequence of DnD actions, you’ll get your GML code wrapped up in an Execute Code DnD Action, and the Object Editor will switch to DnD mode, allowing you to continue programming with DnD actions. While not particularly useful for advanced GMS users who are already familiar with programming in GML, it’s a nice improvement to the way the DnD system works.
GML Code Editor
The new GML code editor is still somewhat rough, but shows promise of numerous improvements. Indenting is standardized, to 4 spaces per tab by default, although this is configurable, and there are subtle guidelines showing where tabs will align to in the background. Row lines are numbered, again configurable if you don’t want to see them.
The most obvious difference is the new color coding for syntax. This may take a bit of getting used to, but at first I found that my code looked very rainbow-y, and I found this to be somewhat of a distraction at first, but after a few days I found that I had adjusted. Every color is customizable, if you want to bother with that.
Auto-completion and hinting is improved in the new editor. All project variables, macros, etc. are included, not just the built-in GML keywords.
The completion hints at the bottom of the Code Editor window are very helpful to remember all the arguments that must be provided to a function, in the right order. And for any scripts which you author, if you use JSDoc commenting, you can provide hints for your own functions as well.
Rough Edges
Cursor navigation keys are either different from standard Windows text editors, or else not yet fully implemented. I’m accustomed to, and very reliant upon, using Home|End|Page Up|Page Down|Shift|Control|Arrows to move the cursor about the window, to select text, and for copy/pasting. In the GMS2 code editor, these keyboard shortcuts do not all work as expected, which can be pretty annoying.
In most text editors, Home and End keys will make the cursor jump to the 0th or last position in a row, or if Ctrl+Home|End is pressed, the 0th or last position in the file. Presently, Home and End do not appear to be supported at all in GMS2.
The Arrow keys move the cursor around the document one character at a time, and if Shift is held down, the characters that the cursor passes over are then selected. Holding Ctrl down will speed the cursor up, moving it a word or a paragraph at a time.
For some reason when selecting text using Ctrl+Shift+Arrow, with the horizontal arrows, the selection gets “stuck” at the beginning/end of a row, and will not advance beyond that unless Ctrl is briefly released. This is a relatively minor annoyance, but should nonetheless be corrected. Normally, Ctrl+Shift and the Left or Right Arrow key will select to the next word, and will wrap lines if it reaches the end of a line.
Up or Down Arrow will move the cursor up or down a row, and with Ctrl+Shift held down, should move up/down to the next blank line. This is standard behavior in pretty much every text editor I’ve used in Windows, or Mac OS for that matter, but it is not the behavior in GMS2 at the time of this writing. I am hopeful that this will be addressed before the end of the Beta.
But by far the biggest thing that users are complaining about in the Community Forums has been the way the IDE wastes space in its default configuration, due to the way Workspaces and the Chain View UI work. Fortunately, breaking out the Code Editor into its own, maximized window is an easy workaround to this problem, and largely addresses it to my satisfaction.
Apart from these issues, I like the new UI for the Object Editor, and the Code Editor very much.