Back in the pre-historic ages, the Defold game engine had a serious issue. More precisely, the Defold game engine editor had a serious issue.
What was this issue, you ask? When any view was loaded that included a coordinate system, such as viewing a sprite component or a particlefx component, the view would be so incredibly zoomed in, forcing us developers to burn whole seconds zooming out with the mouse wheel. These zoom-outs no doubt caused wear-and-tear on my precious $10 mice that I buy on Amazon, burned valuable development time, and added a little bit of reluctance to the conversation when talking about the engine’s positive aspects to other developers.
Far and wide, Defold users complained about this lack of a proper default zoom level. Although, to be fair, I don’t think they complained enough. Just thinking back on those tiny sparks of disgust in my head every time I opened a graphical view makes me want to… ugh, I don’t even want to talk about it. Well, actually that’s the whole point. Now we don’t have to talk about it. Why? Because…
The editor was recently updated to fix this issue! Moreover, the fix was not even a naive one, such as setting the zoom level to maybe a few pixels in diameter, rather than the old .001 or whatever it was. Instead, somebody on the Defold team was considerate enough to auto-adjust the zoom level upon inspecting a graphical component, based on the size of that component. Not only was this a fantastic change, it was a greatly fantastic change. No longer do we burn through valuable seconds adjusting the zoom level multiple times per development session! I’m beaming with joy just thinking about it.
So, to those on the Defold team, I just say this: thank you. Thank you for introducing this wonderful update to the editor, and may there be many more updates of this caliber in the future. Quality-of-life updates aren’t talked about as much as they should be. Sometimes it’s the little things in life that truly make the biggest difference.
The last feature standing in the way of making the editor the best it can be is the ability to increase and decrease the size of all UI elements by pressing CTRL+Plus on Windows, or whatever the equivalent might be on other platforms. This is already possible with the built-in Lua editor, however it doesn’t affect the rest of the UI. This is very important for Defold-related videos, screenshots, or anything else that requires a good look at the editor. I hesitate to make video tutorials or showcase any sort of development without being able to increase the UI size. It’s unprofessional and always a poor viewer experience.
Happy Defolding!
