Sorry if this already exists, I looked and didn’t find anything that was exactly the same. This is specifically referring to the order of animations and function parameters. I know that a topic already exists about ordering animations here, but it’s about 7 years old now.
My request is to modify the existing feature in the sprite editor. I’m not a fan of the drag n’ drop method when it has to be used in a little pop-up window, but I’m not after taking it away from those that do like it. I’d like to see this be a Preference setting option - where some users can choose to use drag n’ drop and others can maybe have up/down arrows instead.
As for function parameters, it would be helpful to have the same reordering ability on these as well. Sometimes I have to add another parameter, which throws off the event description that has already been set.
When you don’t have a lot of parameters, it’s easy enough to make changes that reflect the order in which they are used. But if you have a more complex function with lots of parameters, they can get hard to keep track of if you’re going out of order for the event sheet description.
For a very simple example, let’s say I have a weapons function with PARAM1 as “gun” and PARAM2 as “player”, my event sheet description might read Weapons “gun” “player”, which isn’t a very clear description of what the action does. I could change it to “PARAM2 shoots a PARAM1” so it would read “player shoots a gun”.
But it gets confusing if you were to add additional weapon types and other parameters later. Not only is it confusing to the creator of the function, it might be hard to follow if they export it for others to use as well even if comments are included in the events and the usage instructions are clear.
Let’s say you kept the above described parameters as they are without switching player and gun around and your parameters started to look like PARAM1 (gun) PARAM2 (player) PARAM3 (sword) PARAM4 (slingshot) PARAM5 (club) PARAM6 (lance) PARAM7 (canon) and maybe you realized that you need to also add an update to text object (PARAM8) parameters as well.
Now you would have to edit the event sheet description so it would make sense and probably have to mix up the parameters to be like:
Update PARAM8 if PARAM2 uses a PARAM1 PARAM3 PARAM4 PARAM5 PARAM6 PARAM7
READS: Update text object if player uses a gun sword slingshot club lance or canon
If you could reorder the parameters, you can put the event description in a more sensible order too and only need to add the next PARAM#'s if you had more weapons to put in.
I hope my explanation is clear. Anyone agree or disagree? Maybe it would be ideal if everyone planned out the order of these things before doing the work; that sounds good in theory…doesn’t seem to happen in practice, especially for non-programmers and/or those that are new to game development 