Hello everyone, I have found the need for this feature multiple times and decided to create a post in hopes of a discussion with the community. Would love to get your thoughts and points of views on this request.
When parenting nodes in GUI without the need for a box node an empty transform type is needed. The current work around is to use a box node as parent node, change its scale/size to 0 then set to a layer and assign a texture as to not break batching which would cause more unnecessary draw calls. The box object is rendered anyway. All the other properties, data that the box node has is not needed and unnecessary.
Other Properties:
Size
Size Mode
Texture
Slice9
Color
Alpha
Inherit Alpha
Layer
Blend Mode
Pivot
X anchor
Y anchor
Adjust Mode
Clipping Mode
Clipping Visible
Clipping Inverted
What would an GUI node: ( Empty ) be?
A new GUI node type : Empty , with basic transform properties ( ID / Position / Rotation / Scale ) that can be disabled/enabled and animated with gui.animate(). Could then parent nodes to the empty transform without all the unnecessary steps to not break batching and data attached with the current workaround, creating a much cleaner and easier to understand setup within the Defold editor. I believe it would be another quality of life improvement for the engine.
Please share your thoughts. Maybe I have overlooked or not understood the issue completely. Thanks all!
GitHub Issue: New GUI Node Type : Empty · Issue #5816 · defold/defold · GitHub
