We’re nearly done with Stencyl 2.1 and will be doing a mini-series of posts this week to highlight what’s new.
To recap, Stencyl 2.1 is a pass over the Scene Designer to improve its usability and utility. We haven’t addressed everything, but over the past couple weeks, we’ve tackled what we set out to do.
Inventory Pane
The Inventory Pane lists out all objects inside a scene. Clicking on an entry will scroll to and highlight it in the scene. You can filter the Inventory down using the search bar or filter on particular object types (Actors, Regions, Joints, etc.)
Used in conjunction with the Inspector (Properties) Pane, this makes it easy to locate any object and customize it.
Lots of Shortcuts
Many more shortcuts are available to you, and we’ve taken care to map virtually every action to a shortcut.
- Shortcuts for switching between working modes.
- Shortcuts for all buttons (Toggle Grid, Animations, Background, etc.)
- Shortcuts to make certain panes (Palette, Layers, Inventory, Inspector) active.
- Spacebar to switch between tools / groups.
Place/Move Objects Out of Bounds
You can finally work with objects out of bounds.
Improved Performance
Some users were reporting sluggish performance on complex or large scenes, whether moving objects around or changing scene dimensions through insert/removing rows/columns. These performance issues have been addressed.
Import/Export Games
Last but not least is a little something not related to the Scene Designer, a simple feature to import and export games to your computer.
You can access this feature from the Welcome Center’s toolbar or the File menu. (The Welcome Center is the page that lists out all of your games)
Try it Out Today
These features are available for testing out today. Some aspects, like the Inspector Pane are still in development and may look “raw” – we’ll be wrapping most of this up by this weekend and projecting a release next week.
Try Stencyl 2.1 Now
Next Time: Inspector Pane
In our next posting, I’ll talk about the Inspector Pane, our new and improved way of customizing actors.
