I’m teaching GDevelop to my high school students. Today I’ve had about 100 students and some of them had the issue that if they drag an object into the canvas, that the object will remain invisible. It is there and it can be selected, resized, etc. When we click on ‘preview’, we do see the image properly rendered on the preview, but once we close it, the image is still not visible in the editor.
Because it happens only sometimes, I’ve been not yet been able to reproduce the issue. But I was wondering if this is known behaviour, and what the problem could be? And if I’m lucky, what the solution might be?
I suspect that the selected layer may be invisible and there are events to show it when the game starts (and that’s why the image appear when the preview starts). If it happens again, you can check it in the layer panel:
In my image the Layer called “Background” is selected, so, all instances added to the scene will be added in this layer and because it’s hidden they will not appear. Even when I’m still dragging the instance over the scene it don’t appear.
The issue occured in our very first lesson. No students have had any layers or events added yet (I checked that). We simply added an sprite and tiled sprite and dragged it to the canvas.
And also in your described scenario, I do not seem to be able to select the object but this was the case in my classroom. We could see the blue edges of the focus on the objects. Just not the images themselves. It felt like it failed to render or something.
In the scenario I presented, it would not be necessary to insert a new layer, but the base layer itself that cannot be removed could be hide. And you can select an instance that’s on an invisible layer using the Instance Panel, but not clicking directly on it. But since you’re saying that there were no events that made the layer visible, then the images shouldn’t appear in the preview. This means that what I thought might have been your problem probably wasn’t.
I’ve experienced an issue where some instances would suddenly get flattened and in odd places, but in the preview they show perfectly. It occours a long time ago and never occurred again. I don’t think it’s your problem, but here’s the thread I opened at the time: Scene editor showing instance in the wrong place
For now I don’t have any other ideas, but if I do, I’ll come back here in the thread!
Update:
It turns out that the problem is specific to the device that the online editor of GDvelop is running on. Some computers consistently show the problem, and some consistently work properly. We work with Windows 10 enterprise edition, and with Chrome version 120.0.6099.217. The problem occurs as well in incognito mode, as in normal mode, so browser-cache shouldn’t be the problem.
I checked and the probleem indeed only occurs with tiled sprites. Does anyone know what could cause the issue? Here is an example of the issue.
