Hey Matthew,
This is a super interesting feedback - thanks a lot for taking the time to write all of this down.
A few things on my mind to provide more context in what the future holds:
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Performance Profiler. The state of the existing profiler and debugger make it pretty complex to use and not perfect at all to find performance culprits. We’ll need at some point to improve it to make it real time.
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Fewer bugs in the engine: hard to action as it’s nothing precise in your feedback, but I think this might be linked to your next point…
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Error Handling is more effective: I think this comes done from a design decision a long time ago where we left too much liberty to the user. To mimic languages like JavaScript where variables are dynamically typed, we allowed things like “adding a number” to a variable that is a string (the engine then automatically convert in memory the variable to a number).
This decision and some other (like allowing timers with a name not defined before) actually make things harder. I think we’ll progressively rework the UI so that you’re highly warned whenever you try to use something not properly declared or in an improper way. -
Panel Sprites: I think we have performance issue here indeed.
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Tilemap: should be better with LDTK support just recently added, but I understand the “iteration loop” is long and we might need something to autorefresh what was imported.
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BBText: this is an interesting point where we need to have more objects having their properties customisable per instance. Same for alignement (might be a quick fix).
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File Viewer (what I call Project manager): I get your feeling here. We’re thinking about an overhauled project manager that will show the project in a more hierarchical way, and will allow things to be much more flexible and faster to explore. This would allow global objects to be just moved by drag’n’dropping them from a scene to the project or even “in between” with folders.
I can’t answer to everything but this feedback is very interesting and hopefully we’ll be able to work on it in the next months (or have the help from contributors :)).
Thanks again!