1.7 Beta! New features! #We'reSoBack

Been a minute!

I finally had some time to get this update going after releasing a little commercial game that used GM Link all the way through! I'd been wanting to dogfood GM Link for a while to test its capabilities and find issues and rough edges. TRIMJOB was the end product of that and thus this update's changes came from a mixture of insights gained from doing that and user feedback (thanks a lot guys!)

Enough rambling though, let's get to the new stuff!

New "strip" feature 

If you want to easily import sprite-sheet style animations or don't want to use tags, you can now do this. Simply create a wide slice covering your frames/pieces of sprites and flick the Strip checkbox in the toolbar under Anim. That's it. You don't have to specify frame count anywhere as that is calculated automatically (by saying width divided by height). If a slice is marked as a strip and you set the origin point afterwards, it will calculate the correct position for it. The strip feature was suggested by @GrogDev.

New bulk naming capabilities

The toolbar has gotten another tab! Head over to the Name tab for a few simple ways to quickly modify the names of any number of slices at once. Useful if you want to refactor the naming convention of lots of sprites for example.

Set the default GM location for sprites

Suggested by @GrogDev, you can now set a default location for sprites if you haven't specified anything else. That is, a subdirectory within the "Sprites" folder in your GM project.

All the other changes and additions

• Using multiple Aseprite documents for one GM project no longer clears the slice hash cache (and thereby won't trigger a full re-import from the other documents linked to the same project) - a button to manually reset the cache has been added to the Configuration menu
• Added option in toolbar to not append the tag name to the sprite when importing to GM
• This one is big for larger projects: Added option to only update the currently selected slices. Do this by pressing SHIFT+F6 instead of SHIFT+F5 (or remap that in the Aseprite keybinding settings) This can save a lot of update time when having tens or hundreds of slices in one document
• The sprite bounding box (bbox) is now calculated on every update instead of only the first when set to "Automatic" (Thanks @CookieDraggy)
• Most actions have now been wrapped inside transactions in order to make the Undo History more clean after updating (Thanks @SpookySquidGames)
• Closing the document with the toolbar open now closes the toolbar and doesn't produce errors
• A minor oversight, causing the slice tool to slightly freeze upon doing anything with it, has been fixed and should be smooth now
• Added various error message dialogs throughout to better inform about issues
• Cleaned up the UI various places

Thanks for using GM Link, and I really hope this helps with your workflow! As always, please take care when using as there could be bugs or unwanted behaviour. I cannot guarantee that GM Link doesn't have flaws that could affect your project file(s). Use version control/backups. :-)

- Tore