Timelines

The new version of WADE introduces the concept of timelines: a series of events at predefined moments in time, that can be easily defined in the editor or in code as a JSON structure.

By the way, notice how in the picture above the syntax highlighter recognizes some wade-specific constructs now - that's pretty cool when it works together with the updates to the autocomplete, but more about that in a moment.

Project Search

You can now search for everything in your project files, from the top bar or by pressing Ctrl+Shift+F at any time. WADE won't simply find matches in the text content of each file, but will parse scene data and object data structures to highlight individual properties, functions, etc. that match your search. It's probably best explained with a picture:

As you can see above, the search is extended to object properties as well, so for example searching for "64" will find all sprites that have size 64.

The best part about this, is that clicking any search result will take you to the relevant panel (e.g. the sprite editor if the search result is a sprite property), or to the relevant line of code in the appropriate code editor. It really makes it much easier to find things.

Remember, however, that this will search all your saved project files. It won't find things that you've just typed if you haven't saved them.

Underscores!

There is a new way to reference objects that are in the scene, using a global _ (underscore) variable. So for example, if you have an object called "star", instead of doing the usual wade.getSceneObject('star') that is a lot of typing and effort for your finger muscles, you can now do _.star.

This works very nicely with the autocomplete, that shows you a list of scene objects as soon as you start typing _.

You can use it with names that aren't valid variable names too, using the square-brackets syntax _['a name with spaces']

No more jQuery

Starting from version 3.4, the WADE framework no longer needs jQuery to run. That makes your games lighter (users don't need to download jQuery to start playing), and makes WADE a completely standalone library.

A few things that we all used to do in jQuery can now be done directly in WADE through some new functions such as wade.ajax() or wade.extend().

Load JSON data easily

We have improved the way you can load JSON data into your app directly from the editor: you can now specify where, in the wade.app object, you want to store your JSON data, like this:

So for example, if you type settings in the "Where to store it" box, the contents of your JSON file will be accessible through the wade.app.settings object.

Lots of bits and pieces

Quite a few little improvements to the API and the editor (by the way, look out for a little icon in the top-left that lets you show and hide invisible objects in the editor). And the bug fixes, let's not forget about those.

If you want to know all the details, have a look at the change log. And please let us know if you notice anything that needs fixing!