they're..............eh
i understand the purpose of a lot of revisions; they're switching to a large reliance on "layers" instead of pure depth, which helps a lot with organization, and tilesets and backgrounds are both just sprites now, with tilesets just tacking on extra properties to an existing sprite, which is a really nice unification of assets
the new tileset format is really throwing me off. all i need to do is replace like, a couple tile_adds, a tile_exists and a tile_delete, 'cept i don't really know which functions are supposed to replace them yet. that and me worrying about code optimization makes me conflicted if i should just go with the standard -y thing as usual and just have a fuckton of tile layers.
also annoying is how i apparently need to make every tile a square, which i'm not actually doing; the vertical tiles are 16x8, since a z-level is 8 pixels instead of 16
there's a blog post on gm's website that has an alternative method of depth by having the tiles be all on the same layer, tilt every sprite, and use a custom shader and a z-buffer to cut off sprites behind terrain. it all seems really confusing and with a lot of caveats that don't really seem worth it
The UI is.........i don't like it. i liked being able to have separate windows for everything since you could like, have one code window be fullscreen, but now it's trapped in this tiny little workspace mini-window and like wtf
overall i think it's more a matter of getting aquainted with the new UI than outright bad decisions, but it's still frustrating to be set back so far