With the recent event of my graphics card dying, depriving me of my primary monitor, I’ve been using on-board graphics with my secondary monitor which is rather small. This monitor’s small size makes it difficult to work in studio.
When I’ve tried to use Studio on my laptop in the past (also has a small screen), I’ve experienced the same problem. If you look closely at those screenshots, you’ll notice that I have multiple tabs on each pane. The output has the Ouput, Toolbox, and ScriptPerformance, the explorer Game and Explorer, and advanced objects Context Help and Advanced Objects. It takes an unpleasurable amount of time to close those if I want extra screen space, and then I have to open all of the panes that I closed when I need them again. I’ve been repeating this over and over while working in Studio on my laptop in the past and on this monitor today, and needless to say it has not been fun.
It would be super handy if I could set the left, right, (and bottom if need be) pane groups to auto-hide until I move my mouse near the edge. Not only would this make development on laptops and smaller monitors bearable, but it would also allow normal-sized screen monitors to take advantage of the maximum amount of screenspace by hiding unneeded panes. I would want to be able to toggle this on a per-pane-group basis for it to be as useful as possible – I would want to hide the left pane group in those screenshots, but not the right one because I need to glance at child hierarchies frequently.
I would 10/10 like this to be a thing, and I think adding window layout saving would just be the icing on the cake. A similar argument could be said for window transparency in general.
I don’t need to see the explorer, properties, ect… when testing a game with 3 clients, I’d much rather be able to see all 3 clients at once without having to close 30 windows just to get a good game window size. Echos idea fits in perfect because I could just hide the output until mouse over if something breaks without loosing a good chunk of screen space.
You can’t minimize it once you do, so once I pop out the viewport and want to interact with something beneath it (covered panes, script editor, or start page) I have to drag it out of the way. To put that into perspective, in this screenshot I popped the viewport out and tried to edit a script:
Taking it out of the main panel takes more effort than you’d expect. You have to pop it out, drag it to the corner of the render window so it doesn’t try to snap back into the main pane (you also have to make it small before that so you don’t end up with the viewport off the screen because then you can’t resize the corner that’s off-screen), and then resize it back to its proper size. Dragging it back into the main pane and then having to repeat that process of dragging it out and having it at the right size/position is just about as much work as individually closing/opening all of the other panes.
