Tips and Tricks

On Fighter Factory Studio we changed so many things that, probably, you didn't notice most of them. Let's list important changes and "unknown/unused" features here:

1) Project -> Save As: on FF3, it calls Save As on every active editor, one by one. Now, all functions on Project menu works by modifying the entire project, as one entity. Save as will let you make a copy of everything in the current project on a new location you choose in just one Open Dialog. This way, you can open base project, save it on another location and start modifying, or just do a manual backup. In full game mode (editing an entire game), you can make a full copy of all files in the reference engine package to a new location to start your game. Amazing, isn't?

2) Project - Backup / Restore backup: Backup function in FF3 exists, and it's fully functional. But now, we made the same changes as 'Save As', by modifying project as just one entity, and changed restoration behavior. This is very important to keep in mind: It OVERWRITE current files with backup ones, and reloads the Project, so all changes will be lost. This is the common behavior of almost all backup software. You can think backup creation is almost the same as 'Save as' function, but the main difference is: backup keep references in Project to the original files, so if you modify them and save changes, original files will be overwritten, not your manual backup with 'Save as'.

3) High DPI support and scaling: Studio fully support high DPI displays, so interface scales nicely and looks gorgeous. Support for this may vary based on your system. Eg.: Windows 10 Anniversary Update added some functions that makes this work better. Earlier version do not work right in all cases. You may notice inconsistencies in various Linux Desktop Environments too. Using larger font doesn't help you, the system must support scaling for this work right. macOS does it automatically, so no problem on this system.

4) Edit -> Code -> Fold / Unfold all: This is very interesting, and makes the code folding feature even more useful. You can colapse or expand all code blocks at same time, so if you want to focus on something and still be able to look at other locations this will help a lot.

5) Zoom on code editors: Now, you will be able to increase or decrease font size in code editors using the zoom controls. This change is temporary, it will revert to default (in Options window) when you close the program.

6) View -> Clipboard container: It's an useful, simple but unused feature. You can store on it named copies from Cut and Copy functions, and Paste them later This works on any editor that support these operations, including hit boxes on graphic mode.

7) Palette -> Remap: This function exists on FF3, but many people don't know it's there. or how useful it is. This function, as its name says, redirect some palette to another one for viewing purposes. This remap is global in the current Project, so if you switch between editors it's still  valid until removed.

8) Sprites -> Crop / Resize: People who used FF3 know this, but is not clear all changes it made. Besides the function itself, it do offset/scaling changes on animations and hit boxes to match the changes on sprites.

9) Cut / copy and paste works with selected hit boxes on Animations editor. It puts on Clipboard hit box code, so you can paste both on graphic mode and code/text mode.

10) Animations -> Optimize: This function was added recently, and removes unneeded comments (keeps just the ones before a code block) and try to reduce the use of hit boxes making them default.

11) Organizer on Commands editor: You can reorder commands easily. FF3 can do this too but many people don't know it's possible.

That's it!