Been using Defold for several months now, it’s generally good but there’s a lot of minor annoyances which altogether make it quite frustrating to use sometimes. I use Unity in my day job so I’m generally comparing it to that. These are in no particular order and I haven’t tried Editor 2 so some may be irrelevant now.
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Allow negative scales. If I want to flip something horizontally it’s obvious and intuitive to set the x scale to -1 but very awkward and unintuitive to have to set x and z rotation to 180.
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Let me get the position of a sprite. I shouldn’t need the workaround of setting another parent game object. Seriously.
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Highlight the existing text when I click to edit a field. When you tab into a field it highlights the existing text so you can just start typing, great. But it doesn’t do that when you mouse click into a field.
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When you leave a field, make the leftmost part of it visible. The first few digits of a number and the first few characters of a string are always the thing I want to see. Is this y position positive or negative? In the order of hundreds or thousands? Who knows!
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Have draggable handles for tweaking numbers. This is so useful in Unity. To tweak numbers in Defold you have to click in the field, delete the existing number (see point 3), enter a new number, hit enter, repeat…
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Be able to disable physics for a collection. It has an overhead, if I know I’m not using any physics in that collection let me remove the overhead.
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Project setting changes aren’t detected until you select a different field. For some reason changing the project settings is a lot weirder than everything else. Changes aren’t detected (IIRC they actually don’t apply) until you select a different field? Also the mouse scroll wheel works erratically in the project settings, sometimes just not working at all.
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Scale the tiles in the tile preview window. Time to edit a level in my very low-res pixel art game, I’ll just select the 8x8 tile I want… Oh wait they’re so small I can’t tell what they are! I’ve resorted to placing one of every tile off to the side then making heavy use of the ‘right-click to select that tile’ feature.
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Make mouse controls (maybe keyboard too) affect where the cursor is, not which panel has ‘focus’. In Unity if I have two panels open that both have scroll bars I can just mouse over one and start scrolling, it’s great. In Defold I have to click to ‘focus’ that panel, then click back in the other one…
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MIDDLE MOUSE PAN. These aren’t in order but if they were this would definitely be number 1. Having to hold the Alt key to middle mouse drag pan is ridiculous, just let me middle mouse drag alone.
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Be able to place rulers/guides in the scene editor. My game is 128x128 with 8x8 tiles, so it’s really useful for me to set the grid size to 8. But unless the grid size is 128 I can’t easily tell where the edges of my screen are without counting. I usually add a temporary sprite sized to my screen resolution then delete it when I’m done, which is stupid.
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Generate code with tabs, not spaces. If my text editor is set to use tabs instead of spaces, when you auto generate the init, update etc. functions in a new file why does it still use spaces?
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Issues with changed files list and synchronizing. Quite often the changed files list will go blank and if I try to synchronize it won’t do anything, I have to edit a file and save it to repopulate the list and see all the changes I actually care about
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Issues finding a resource. Sometimes when I’m editing a field and click the ellipsis to select a file the list of matching items is just empty or half populated, I have to delete the asterisks and start typing to find what I actually want.
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Remember the camera position and zoom when opening a collection. When you open a collection the camera is positioned and zoomed to frame the entire collection, but 99% of the time I then pan and zoom back to the same place I always do.
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Snapping doesn’t work. When moving things around the scene editor you can hold shift to snap to the grid, great. Except it doesn’t force the snapping, you can still place things in between the grid positions. So even if my grid is 1 pixel I still can’t reliably place things at exact pixels because it might not snap. Also, if I’m dragging only the horizontal position handle while snapping, I really don’t want the y position to also snap to the nearest grid.
