Symbols - a buggy and memory intensive thing?

[sumneuron]

So I am not new to Affinity Designer, but I am moving from basic user status into diving deeper into what the software can do. Recently, I asked a question regarding how to have a texture in one place (e.g. an image or a pixel layer) and use it in masks across several layers, groups, children etc.

I was told this is currently no possible, but I could make the texture a symbol and then this would allow me to update the symbol and get a similar effect.

 

However symbols are buggy as heck. If they are not buggy, than their "feature" feels very much like a bug. Copy and pasting a group / layer with symbols into a new document gets the symbols to highlight in the layers panel, but not in the symbol panel.

What inspired me to write this post is that after several days of not working on a document which has a symbol used as described above, it appears somehow a "lighten" effect has been applied to the symbol which I can not remove. I can not desync, recreate the symbol, or anything in the existing document to fix this. So I just removed all the symbols and copy-pasted into a new document.

 

In my (subjective) experience, documents with symbols also are more memory hungry than the same file without symbols (e.g. just opening one with symbols ramps fans, and one without does not).

I give.

I read the docs on symbols and they are both un-intuitive and buggy.

I welcome anyone who can help explain why these things might occur, but I dont want to risk my document symbol's getting corrupted and having to remake a document because of this.

 

They feel very much like the "Mask Layer" button which users more profession than I state that they have no idea what it does (since making something a child does what they want).

[Aammppaa]

Symbols in 1.6.5 are buggy. 

I believe that much of the code relating to symbols has been reworked in 1.7 as it is the technology on which master pages are based. 

So hopefully they will be more stable and more useful. 

Have you tried the 1.7 beta? 

[sumneuron]

@Aammppaa haven't tried the beta.

Really, all I want is to setup a few layers in the background (texture-1, texture-2, texture-3) and then organize my layer panel however I want and for a few choice groups, layers, or objects, have them mask all the way to a specific layer (e.g. link-mask)

[Callum]

On 5/22/2019 at 4:36 PM, sumneuron said:

@Aammppaa haven't tried the beta.

Really, all I want is to setup a few layers in the background (texture-1, texture-2, texture-3) and then organize my layer panel however I want and for a few choice groups, layers, or objects, have them mask all the way to a specific layer (e.g. link-mask)

Please could you try the beta and see if that improves performance?