You could use the Ctrl + T trick I mentioned above, but sometimes you can’t remember the specific name of the resource, or you want to keep all similar resources, or ones associated with a specific gameobject, together. Resource views: As a project gets larger, the amount of resources and folders you need to keep track of can become hard to handle, especially when trying to find specific resources related to one another. Extremely useful to find what you need without relying on your mouse.Ĥ. Switch workspaces with Ctrl + Tab: Now that you have your workspaces neatly set up, how about a nicer way to navigate through them? With Ctrl + Tab, you can quickly preview and switch between workspaces, and even access specific windows/tabs opened within those workspaces. These workspaces will even reopen exactly as you left them if you close GameMaker and return to it later.ģ. You can even name each workspace by slowly double-clicking on the tab name or selecting the tab and pressing F2, further improving your organization. This will reduce the overall number of resources you have visible without requiring you to close everything else first, which allows you to go back to working on that previous feature whenever you want, as you already have the necessary objects and scripts opened there. No problem, just create a new workspace and open resources there. Thing is, you realize you need to work on something else now, but haven’t finished the other feature. You can have a workspace with all the resources you think are necessary in there to find them all easier. Say you are implementing a feature that involves the player and a couple of enemies. Sure, you can work using only one workspace, but that is wasting the potential of this feature. With the introduction of workspaces, you can now organize what you are working on by type of resource, or by a specific feature.
#Game maker studio 2 vs 1 windows#
Workspaces: Gone are the days where you had tens of separate windows opened cluttering your screen. This will display a window with a search bar that looks into every resource in your project, making it extremely fast to find what you are looking for and improve your overall workflow.Ģ. It may take a while to get into the habit of using these, but once you do, save a lot of time that would have been wasted navigating the interface with a mouse.ġ. Navigate resources with Ctrl + T: Taking a hint from a famous Visual Studio plugin, GMS2 added the option to quickly search for any asset, be it a script, object, sprite, you name it, by simply using the Ctrl + T hotkey. In this section, I will list a few features you should try at least once, since they can improve your workflow significantly. I am really excited about most of the new features coming up in the next few months, listed in the road map, so I figured I’d talk about those too and the cool possibilities those features will unlock. Now it’s been about a year since the release and even though there are quite a few articles out there detailing the new features and some tips for more hidden functionality, I thought it would be a good idea to make a list of interesting tips and tricks to consider while using GMS2. These were not exaggerations, as GMS2 is a vast improvement over 1.4, adding tons of new features, streamlining most processes that used to be unintuitive, and improving the overall workflow for the engine. Around three months passed between the release of GMS2 and the first time I could pick it up due to work, but I had heard fantastic things about the new version.
After using GMS1.4 extensively while developing INK and HackyZack, I learned to work around its quirks.