ygoe

Hello, I discovered one more unexpected behaviour in Affinity Designer on Windows. I'm matching photographs of a wall in a room with marks on it. The wall has been photographed in multiple parts, and the marks have measured positions. So I can adjust the perspective of all photos in the document to match a linear projection. Anyway, I'm using the pixel persona/perspective adjustment layer to correct the photos. As per the tutorial, I'm supposed to apply the adjustment by closing its panel window. That works. But if I switch back to the default vector persona before closing that panel, the adjustment layer gets converted into something I cannot identify. Its icon isn't the perspective grid anymore, but instead something almost entirely white. It also can't be edited anymore as expected. I have no clue what it becomes, but it's not usable as intended. Should be simple to reproduce. If you need more details, please ask.

All on local disks and file systems.

Here it is, just a few minutes later, after I had to restart AD because its parametric resize failed on me – again! I wanted to pin the object on the right edge and change its width to the left by entering the number, but it would always change it to the right instead. Restarting AD helps here but it's annoying. Just another never fixed bug. It's falling apart. So here's the screenshot of the topic:

What is the Anchors panel? Sorry, I forgot the make a screenshot, but I see this message at least once a day (just not when starting again immediately). Also, I noticed that the lock file seems to be left if I closed the app discarding changes I made, and it seems to be deleted when there were no unsaved changes. I'm wondering if this bug will ever be fixed. Bug fixing has never been quick here and now that the company is sold, who knows what will happen still.

The issues persist in version 2.6.2 on Windows 11.

You didn't register the clicked object to be moved? I did. And it's even visible. And that is the bug. I don't care if it marks the document modified when it isn't. It marks it modified for other reasons as well that aren't that interesting to me. I'm used to that. But when an object is moved when I don't notice, it can permanently cause damage because things aren't where they should be anymore. In a technical drawing this is very bad.

Sorry for the long delays, but it's very annoying to do the QA work of your product. I provided all information that I have. I'll try to get another recording with the history again. It would probably be easier for me to dig through your code than providing ever more information of unknown use.

Anyway your approach sounds complicated to me. I guess I'd need a group of layers with each 2 layers to do this, one with the content and the other with the adjustment. (Maybe I'm imagining it wrong now, never done that.) Please remember that I also need to work with these layers so I need to find them and add objects to the correct layer. Having to go deeper in some hierarchy of layers doesn't make that easier. And occasionally I want to make individual adjustments to layer visibility or opacity to better visualise certain aspects of the plan. The saved snapshots should then bring me back to a defined named state. I just tried something with a layer adjustment (or what that is) to bring the RGB alpha curve of a layer to max 0.5 instead of 1. Same visual effect again, and I can hide (i.e. disable) that adjustment in its context menu. (Again, no visual clue whether it's active or inactive until I open the context menu of the adjustment. And it's also not obvious that it limits opacity until I open its settings.) But the snapshot also ignores that. It's like it totally ignores everything but the bare visibility of a layer. I really can't see how it would do anything else of that what's described in the help document. It's interesting to see at how many places I can set a layer's opacity level, both forward and backward (by dialing down an opacity-reducing effect). If you want to confuse future readers of that file, it's very easy. I prefer to stick with the plain opacity value that's shown right above the layers list. It's very clear and visible and easy to use. Can't that just be included in the state/snapshot? Shouldn't be all that complicated to implement that.

I can't open that file as it was created with a version newer than what's currently available. Did you post this in the future? 😉

Oh great, so somebody might add that tag to this thread as well. I don't know what's in that issue though as I can't read Affinity's issue tracker. And a fix would still be highly appreciated. I'm wondering if somebody could shed some light on why it's taking over a year already to correct the handling of window coordinates in pointer input events. I mean, that's one of the most essential features of an app like this. There should be no bugs in there, really. No other application ever had this bug as far as I know. So it really is surprising. And somewhat critical, too.

Thank you for the explanation.

Is this opacity in the bottom right corner "Fx"? Because that also isn't regarded. It looks the same as layer opacity to me, it's less obvious though (it's hidden in that dialogue and not indicated elsewhere). So I could live with it if it were regarded.

Okay, never used that. So I reverted the layer opacity to 100% and set the fill opacity in the layer effects to 50% instead for one snapshot and 100% for another. Still not working. The visual effect is the same so I could live with this alternative setting (even though it's less obvious) but the value is also not captured in the snapshot or applied from it. If none of this is supposed to work in fact, I take back my "perfect" and my question to support this remains open.

Please explain what those layer properties are that should be considered. I haven't found any.

Theoretically, perfect. Thanks for the hint. It doesn't behave as described, though. While it applies all layer visibilities that I captured in the state, it doesn't update their opacities. All layers remain at their current opacity. It's totally ignored that some layers were dimmed in one of the snapshots. I haven't touched anything other than bringing the document in the desired state and then adding a snapshot. All snapshot options (visibilities, properties) are still enabled. Also, the states panel is very primitive. I can't rename or reorder the entries in there. When creating multiple snapshots, they're in some arbitrary order and I cannot directly fix that. I could only iterate all states in the order I want them, create new states with new names, and finally delete the old states. (Untested) Besides, the German translation is a bit odd. "State" is translated as "Status". But that would rather be "status" in English, and a better fitting UI text would be "Zustand" (pl. "Zustände"). It's a common translation mistake. PS: Each saved snapshots says "20247 layers" below its name. I didn't know I have that many layers. Objects, maybe, but not layers.