Gb-studio: [Request] Copy/Paste Actors across scenes

[KitF]

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• I'm submitting a ...

  • [ ] bug report
  • [x] feature request
  • [ ] support request => Please do not submit support request here, see note at the top of this template.

• Do you want to request a feature or report a bug?
  A feature

• What is the current behavior?
  Can't copy/paste actor scripts across scenes

• If the current behavior is a bug, please provide the steps to reproduce and if possible a minimal demo of the problem

• What is the expected behavior?
  I want to be able to move or copy an actor between scenes. I set up a test in the initial scene, but when I went to move it to a new scene, I found that I couldn't.

• What is the motivation / use case for changing the behavior?
  Moving NPCs between scenes after testing them in a proof of concept without having to copy/paste each event individually

• Please tell us about your environment:

  • Version: 1.0.0
  • Platform: [Windows]

• Other information (e.g. detailed explanation, stacktraces, related issues, suggestions how to fix, links for us to have context, eg. stackoverflow, gitter, etc)

[chrismaltby]

Good idea. I'm thinking first add a button here on scripts, actors and triggers

that would open a dropdown with

• Copy Script
• Replace Script
• Paste Script Before
• Paste Script After
• Delete Script

Allowing you to move scripts around a lot easier.

We should also have keyboard shortcuts Cmd/Ctrl + C, and Cmd/Ctrl + V to copy/paste the selected actors / triggers (paste would place on the scene directly under the mouse)

Then I also think you should be able to move actors and triggers between scenes by dragging them, same as you can now for scene transition destinations and the player start position.

[HeyItsLollie]

Would it make sense to have prefabs for instanced actors/triggers?

You could create an actor that is set up with common events, for example: a specific character with blank text fields that always triggers certain events when they enter/exit the scene, or an item with a blank "set flag" field that always plays a jingle when collected. Any time you need a specific actor, you could just select it from an assets/prefabs list and drag it into the scene.

GB Studio could reference the prefab, lock pre-existing events on a prefab so that only their variables can be edited (if you want to remove events that come with the prefab, you have to break prefab instance), and piggy-back additional events on top of the reference for the prefab. If you ever need to update a prefab project-wide, you could edit the prefab directly, and your changes would automatically be available across the whole project.

[chrismaltby]

Prefabs is a good idea definitely, think that’s an idea for a future version though. Just going to put copy/paste in for now and we could revisit this later.

[chrismaltby]

As of 7d4ab30978c2b44f9e6a25cb3dcddd7d68a944b1 you can now copy/paste scripts as I suggested. Also you can copy/paste actors, triggers and even entire scenes by using Cmd/Ctrl + C, and Cmd/Ctrl + V and can drag actors and triggers between scenes.