Build 294.1 - Beta version

I have not been able to replicate the conditions to repeat this issue, but I was cloning an active object and editing it (copy and pasting different graphics in from Photoshop). The active object had two frames of looping animation. After the third clone operation (so I now had four versions on the frame), when I ran the frame only the last active object appeared. Looking in the debug window the other three were not there to add (only this fourth one).

They all had the same properties, to be created at start for example. Changing any of the properties had no effect, the other three active objects would not appear in the game when I ran it.

I have saved my MFA and closed/reopened and this issue in no longer occurring, all four active objects are now appearing when I run. Sorry it is not a lot to go on, thought better to report it.

Thanks for a fantastic update. So many great new features! Overall, it's still a bit laggy and unstable (I've had a few crashes, found a critical bug or two, and certain things are noticeably laggier than 293) but it's a beta after all. Once the problems are ironed out, it'll easily be the best update since 2.5+. Even just being able to rearrange the altVals feels surprisingly liberating! I've explored basically all of the Windows-related features and changes now. Below is my feedback.

------Toolbars

--With a real, large MFA loaded, the new Workspace Toolbar is very laggy. Dragging an edge to resize it lags for a few seconds, as does clicking the +/- buttons to unfold frames. There was zero discernible lag in 293.

--When the Properties Window is in Floating mode, it's broken on startup. I need to reload the skin to fix it (this happens no matter which skin I use):

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--The Event Explorer disappears after a moment whenever I launch Fusion. I have to manually turn it on from the menu each time.

--We have more toolbars than ever now. It would be nice to be able to [re]map keys to toggle them all. Currently, some have hard-coded hotkeys that can't be changed (eg. Layers, Workspace) while others have none (eg. Event Explorer, Skin)

--The Save App as Text feature is great. Though Windows won't let me delete the newly created folder until I quit Fusion, because 'another app is using this file'. Should Fusion somehow 'let go' of the files once it creates them?

--Some of the greyed-out buttons on the Layer Toolbar are pretty hard to see on my monitor. Especially the Lock All button:

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--Is there a point to the tab (yellow cog) in the Skin Toolbar? Will there be more tabs eventually?

--There's a design fault when the Layers Toolbar is docked and folded on the side of the screen. When you drag an object in the Frame Editor to the side of the screen, it triggers the Layers Toolbar to unfold. This conflicts with another feature: dragging an object to the edge to pan the canvas. Fusion assumes you're trying to drag it onto the Layers Toolbar, and blocks the canvas panning. The problem is especially noticeable if you have a non-maximised Frame Editor that's nowhere near the Layers Toolbar (see pic below). This problem existed in 293, but comes into sharper focus with 294 because of the tab feature. If you have two Frame Editors in vertical tab groups, dragging an object from one Frame Editor to the other will trigger the Layers Toolbar to unfold halfway through the operation, which is laggy and distracting. Perhaps the solution is to trigger the Layers Toolbar unfolding based on proximity to the Layers Toolbar itself, and not on proximity to the Frame Editor edge.

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--It would be great if we could dock certain toolbars (eg. Layers Toolbar) to the end of a tab group, and not just the end of the entire Fusion window

--When editing the top toolbars in 293, it was easy to add blank spacers to spread out and position buttons where desired. I think some of the default toolbars had these spacers already, so you could just duplicate those. There seems no way to find these spacers in 294.

--When you release an altVal after moving it, the properties window snaps back up to the top. Due to this it's cumbersome to rearrange altVals that are at the bottom of the list, beyond the bounds of the window. It's also quite hard to drag an altVal all the way down to the very bottom of a long list of altVals. Every time you release the altVal because you've reached the edge of the window, it snaps to the top, so you have to scroll back down to where you were, and you've now also lost track of where exactly you left the altVal you were moving. Can you change it so that after dragging an altVal, the properties window doesn't snap back up to the top?

------Event List Editor

--Find All is critically broken. Open a frame in the Event List Editor do Find All, and press ESC (searching also produces the bug but is unnecessary). Do this a few times, and you should see that the Event List Editor becomes unresponsive, with many of its events vanishing. This happens for both large and tiny MFAs for me. Interestingly, there's no problem with an MFA containing only Always: Storyboard Object>End Frame events. But the moment I add an event like Always: Active Object> Set Alterable Value or Always: Player 1> Set player name to "bla", the bug will occur.

--The 'jump keys' have vanished from certain right-click menus. For example, we used to be able to Right-Click a condition and hit N to "Negate", which was much faster than having to mouse over and click the "negate" entry . But the menu entries no longer have jump keys.

------Animation Editor

--Dragging the horizontal divider up and down causes visual glitches. They go away after a few clicks. This didn't happen to me before:

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--When you ctrl+alt+fill, it does change all the colors in all frames, but it doesn't update the thumbnails.

--The above-mentioned feature seems to have introduced lag when using the other tools while holding ctrl and/or alt (eg. brush tool)). Perhaps you can force the new code to only run while the fill tool is active?

--Actually, drawing is noticeably laggier in 294 even without holding ctrl or alt (I compared it). Especially on objects that contain a lot of animations.

--When keep original hotspots is checked, Fusion still allows you to interact with the Hotspot and Action Spot dropdowns. Should they be greyed out?

--When importing an image from file into the Animation Editor, the thumbnail updates, but the main image does not (until you zoom or otherwise interact with the Animation Editor)

--The Teal Diamond has had a handsome little makeover!

------Frame Editor

--The View>Zoom>xx% menu items are incorrect. 25% actually does 10%, 50% does 25%, 75% does 50%, and so on.

--If I could choose only one fix from this whole list, it would probably be this one: Having multiple Frame Editors open would be super useful, but is borderline unusable because zooming affects all windows at once. When you zoom in on one, the other(s) zooms too. What's worse, the other window(s) zoom using the centre point of the current window, which usually means that the other views move disorientingly far away from where you had them. In fact, just switching from Event List Editor to Frame Editor in Tab Group A can make the Frame Editor shoot to a seemingly random spot in Tab Group B. This problem existed in 293 too, but is highlighted by the new multi-tab feature which encourages multiple open editors, and the "included frame" feature, which can also encourage working with multiple frame editors open.

--Zooming during create object works well. Being able to pan with MMB and/or Space would be helpful too.

--Panning the Frame Editor at 10% is pretty laggy. That's to be expected I guess, but could Fusion maybe somehow display objects in lower quality when at that low zoom level, or perhaps cache zoomed-out thumbnails of objects so it doesn't have to continually recalculate them when it redraws them?

--Selecting multiple duplicate objects and hitting the "new" altVal/string/flag button creates glitches:

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--Selecting multiple duplicate objects and deleting an existing altVal/string/flag produces an error:

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--When multiple objects with differing altVal Values are selected, no value is displayed in the Properties Toolbar, as displaying a value would wrongly imply that all objects have that value. This should also happen with multiple objects of differing Instance Values, but doesn't:

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--I do a lot of cloning of objects with numbers at the end, and in many cases my code breaks if I don't remove the extra space that Fusion used to put there. I'm very pleased that it no longer does

------Misc

--The New Condition and New Action windows no longer correctly accept keyboard input. Before, you could use arrow keys and Enter to navigate objects and their dropdown menus. Now, the arrows don't affect the menus, and Enter just closes the window. This has ruined all my macros :o

--Working with multiple MFAs often ends up causing slowdowns and glitches, though I've been unable to reproduce these 100%. But if you load up a few large MFAs plus some new MFAs, open them in all tabs and play around with them for a while, you may see what I mean. For me, it doesn't take long before problems arise. The bugs I've seen include:
-the most recently-loaded MFA being much slower to work with than usual, even if it's a tiny MFA (eg. 2-3 second delays for moving an object, creating an object, deleting an action, adding a condition, etc.)
-I hit the hotkey for Event List Editor in one tab, then suddenly get switched to a different tab that belongs to a different MFA, but the previous MFA disappears and is replaced by the MFA I was working on. Now if I press the hotkey for certain editors (eg. Frame Editor) it will jump me to the other tab and vice versa.

--While your edrt.exe is running, Fusion doesn't properly clean up Editor window right-clicks (especially when combined with Menu Bar clicks):

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--The Overlapping Object at... condition seems to be broken. It says it checks for whether two objects overlap each other at X,Y, but in reality it seems to check whether one object overlaps the space at X,Y. (I actually think this would be a super useful condition to have, by the way, maybe even more so than the intended one. If you fix this, please consider keeping this as a separate condition):

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--When you are in the Welcome page in tabbed mode, double-clicking a frame in the Workspace Toolbar will unexpectedly replace the frame in the tab to the right, instead of your current tab:

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--It takes a bit of time to set up tabs the way one likes each time. It would be nice if Fusion remembered how tabs were positioned and which windows were in each tab group. Maybe Save Project could save this info? Remembering the state of the Event Explorer would be nice too.

--All my bookmark-related keyboard shortcuts (f11, ctrl-f11, etc.) had very many repeated entries (almost 1000 each!) for some reason. It hasn't happened with any other keyboard shortcuts. This occurred with 293 (I'm guessing they accrued over time somehow); I don't know if it relates to 294.

------Skin

--It would help with styling the Expression Editor/Animation Editor/etc. if the Skin Toolbar worked while those windows were open

--These poor little altVals are having breathing difficulties. I'm sure they would love it if you could nudge them to the right a couple of pixels: X)

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--Is it possible to expose the Event List Editor fonts for skinning? I like the readability of the new font, though it's smaller than before. I'd like to increase the size without having to zoom in (which makes other elements too big).

--Is it possible to expose the Properties Toolbar icons for skinning? The new ones are probably nicer, though I like how crisp and visually consistent the old ones were.

--Dialog text next to dropdowns is cutoff at the bottom. For example, Hotspot and Action Spot in the Animation Editor Import Options dialog. Also Layer in the Create Object dialog:

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--The little arrows at the edge of the tab groups seem to be broken. I assume they're meant to switch between tabs, but nothing happens when I click on them:

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--I think the altVals in the Properties Toolbar would be more readable if the new visible index numbers were a bit less bold. Maybe smaller, or using the 'greyed out' text style, and/or using a 26. Dot instead of (26) Parentheses?

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So far so good for editing, running and compiling a big and complicated project, and had no problem opening all my event groups to display 30k loc and scrolling through them.
I wasn't able to reproduce vol's report of the find all function breaking, at least with a few minutes of basic testing, I might keep try poking it and see if it explodes.

Two small gripes I noticed with some more use, things apparent from my old muscle memory

1. Scrollbars use a thin style with a ~2 pixels width of unselectable area on each side. This hampers ease of use because you can't scroll your cursor to the edge of a window to select a scrollbar, since the last few pixels of width don't hit it. Most scrollbar UI try to use big fat bars that reach all the way to the edge of the window, I think the old MMF2 scrollbars were like that, and I don't see any options on the skin editor. A minor gripe you could learn to work around, but I'd say fat scrollbars should be default.

2. UI elements seem to use a very brief fade-in now, which looks fine, but its a minor obstruction for very fast clicking and navigation. For example, I'm used to right clicking the workspace editor and selecting frame/event editors. Those clicks now have to be separated by a fraction of a second, while on an instant menu element it would register the second click. The fade-in UI could still be preserved and still be instantaneous, if the menu elements were selectable while fading in. Right now a menu can't be interacted with during that fade-in, so I'm noticing a lot of 'failed clicks'

I noticed the qualifier images changing, but I think I'll just get used to memorizing the new ones.

I'm really pleased with the new UI, it's refreshing, like if i have a new software (a preview of Fusion 3?)!

First issue i've spotted is on Android, i haven't did any change to my events yet, just compiled my game and tested it.
So, the problem is with RGB coefficient, it's completly broken on Android. Instead of getting the color selected, everything is white (the default color before RGB coef is applied), then if you choose another color, it changes the color of the object but also the color of every texts! (in my case they are active system box objects).

The text issue seems to happen only on Android 5, i don't get it on Android 11, but the coef that is not kept in memory happens on all android versions.

Also, i don't now if it's normal, but i'm trying to use the new "include frame" optino that is awesome.
So to have one frame with all game engine, and one with only levels objects, i have separated objects between the two frames.
And it's working fine except for one thing. Active Objects that are used for events (for example a mask used to create enemies) are set to "don't create at start" in the game engine frame, and in the level frame they are set to "create at start". But, when playing the level with the game engine included, the mask of the included frame (game engine) will be created even if it is set to "don't create at start".
If it's normal, how can we use this new feature to separate game engine from levels frames ? I want to keep all events in the game engine frame, and no events are set in the levels except if i want exclusive events to that level.

Can it be improved?

Currently, the only easy way i've found, is to add a qualifier to all those objects in both frames, and the put all those objects in the "game engine" frame above the play frame and setup this event:

* Start of Frame
+ Y position of Group.Forbidden < 0
Group.Forbidden : Destroy

Found something a bit odd with theming the Event List Editor. Fusion automatically inverts colors in the list editor when you select groups / events. Beacause of this it seems to cause some theming problems. I thought that 'selected group background' would remedy this but it does nothing. I guess due to the automatic highlighting.

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Quote from Dobermann

I'm really pleased with the new UI, it's refreshing, like if i have a new software (a preview of Fusion 3?)!

First issue i've spotted is on Android, i haven't did any change to my events yet, just compiled my game and tested it.
So, the problem is with RGB coefficient, it's completly broken on Android. Instead of getting the color selected, everything is white (the default color before RGB coef is applied), then if you choose another color, it changes the color of the object but also the color of every texts! (in my case they are active system box objects).

The text issue seems to happen only on Android 5, i don't get it on Android 11, but the coef that is not kept in memory happens on all android versions.

I was able to solve that issue on Android 10 and 11 by settings "ignore if too far" to "no" on the objects where the RGB coefficient is changed.
On Android 5, it still doesn't work...

Loving a lot of the new features.

Some issues I have so far in the beta.
1) The Picture Editor doesn't retain the last maximization setting. I work with high-res art and have it always maximized and in prior versions it'd load to full screen maximization, but seems broken in 294.1.
2) The background behind an image in the Picture Editor doesn't seem to be customizable, or at least I am unsure which setting to change in the Skin Editor. I didn't see a section for Picture Editor settings.

Would it be possible to add a quick sort options for the Alt Values/Strings/Flags? For example:
1) A-Z by name
2) Z-A by name
3) By index lowest to highest
4) By index highest to lowest

Quote from piscesdreams

Would it be possible to add a quick sort options for the Alt Values/Strings/Flags? For example:
1) A-Z by name
2) Z-A by name
3) By index lowest to highest
4) By index highest to lowest

Excellent idea! #3 would let you instantly undo any changes you made, while #1 could in certain cases halve the time it took to organise them how you want

Thanks for the big update. I am using Windows without changing the display scale, just the font size. The build 294 is showing the texts larger than 293, so in some dialogs the texts are hidden.

293.10
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294.1
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Used font change utility: noMeiryoUI
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- Windows runtime: new DPI Aware property. When it's checked Windows won't apply scaling to the application window. You can retrieve the DPI scale with the Storyboard / Screen / DPI Scale expression.
Note: the DPI scale of the main window depends on the monitor it's on. If you do things that depend on the DPI scale, you should watch if it changes (which will happen if the user moves the window to another monitor with a different scaling, or changes the scaling of the current monitor).

- Android / iOS / Mac runtimes: now support pixel shaders. There are limitations though: background shaders are not supported (hopefully in a future version), and shaders can be applied only to active and backdrop objects, not frames or layers yet.

These are pretty interesting. The first one should potentially get rid of the current workaround (registry check) which is great especially for low res games.

For the second item, does this mean I could use a palette swap shader like this: Please login to see this link.
in all of those exporters now?

punchbird yes! A palette shader can work, as long it's applied to the object and not the frame/layer/background (since there are not currently implemented)
But porting will be necessary, I'll be learning how to port those

I can't build an iOS project with Xcode, i get the error "GoogleMobileAds/GoogleMobileAds.h file not found" error.
The GoogleMobileAdsSDKiOS frameworks are correctly included (i still use version 8.7.0). Must i use another version of GoogleMobileAdsSDKiOS?

There's still no active flipping though is there

Quote from Dobermann

I can't build an iOS project with Xcode, i get the error "GoogleMobileAds/GoogleMobileAds.h file not found" error.
The GoogleMobileAdsSDKiOS frameworks are correctly included (i still use version 8.7.0). Must i use another version of GoogleMobileAdsSDKiOS?

you can use sdk 9.5, please check object they mention the new sdk used for updating

Things I've noticed not really mentioned (or I've overlooked) that are awesome. I'm not sure if these are new to 294, if I've just never noticed these before, or if their 2.5+ features.

* Multi-select sounds in Data Elements and Extract all at once. (This is going to save me so much time re-mastering my game's audio during the polish phase.)
* Convert sounds in Data Elements to different formats and bitrates.
* The grid in the Frame Editor is now an actual grid instead of dots!
* Flipping objects via top menu in the Frame editor. It would be even sweeter to also have this option added to the right-click menu in the Frame Editor. (Still hoping for an event driven flipping of active objects though!)

Quote

There's still no active flipping though is there

Peeblo Technically there is now with help of shaders.

What I would like to see in future is an update to the LookAt action so that it sets object's angle instead of direction, resulting in much smoother rotations, especially for large objects.