A few new features, minor bugs, and user questions

The main thing today is that elements drawn with sliced sprites now use the new nineslice feature that comes with GameMaker Studio 2.3.2. This affords a bit more control over how they look than the old version that I’d written. Also, it means that you need to be on at least 2.3.2 to be able to use Emu from this point on. Some other minor fixes are at the bottom.

I’m also interested in making a few bigger changes to this in the moderately distant future, which may change things for anyone who’s already using this for anything, so I’m interested in hearing from anyone for whom this could be a problem.

• Content lists to become arrays (rather than ds_lists)

Arrays are starting to look pretty good.

Recently Yoyo Games added a few new features for dealing with them (adding, deleting, sorting, etc), putting them slightly ahead of ds_lists in terms of functionality, and at some point Yoyo is planning on introducing a few optimizations to make them more performant, as well. Right now, EmuLists can optionally take an existing ds_list to use as its contents. Since the code for this is a bit messier (you need to destroy the lists when you’re done, etc) I’d like to change this to simple arrays some time soon - but anyone who’s already using this with lists will have a bit of work to do to update.

• New version of Scribble

Scribble 7 has been out for a while, and Scribble 8 is on the horizon. The version that Emu uses is 6.0.14a, which is almost a year old now. For simple things this is fine, but it means anyone who’s using this who wants to use a different version of Scribble is going to have a rough time.

Juju thinks Scribble 8 is going to be the last major change to the system, so whenever a stable version of that comes out I’m probably going to go through here and update it the new version. I’ll try to have all of the important bugs I know of fixed before then, so that if anyone needs to stay on an old version they should be able to.

• Dark theme as the default color scheme

I’ll be honest, it looks way better anyway.

Other changes/fixes

• GameMaker nineslices for certain graphics
• The shade drawn behind the top dialog element is now a setting; alpha can be controlled
• Updated links to the documentation
• Checkboxes draw with the correct colors
• Radio elements are grayed out when non-interactive
• Method which do not otherwise return a value now return self, in case you want to chain method call together
• Emu_Core::GetMouseOver(), in case you want to know whether the mouse cursor is over an element’s bounding box