In Lee's blog today, he states the following:
"I dare say we could argue that the whole of the F9 mode should be abolished, but in this case it’s part of a bigger plan to make first person editing a very powerful and liberating feature moving forward. For a long time I personally liked the idea of playing my game, pausing it and adding a few more scenery items, then resuming the game and carrying on to the end. Much more convenient than exiting back to some editor, dropping stuff in, then starting again with a fresh test game! There are other reasons why F9 will become very powerful, but I will keep these secret so I don’t get bashed over the head in two years time for not implementing it "
I disagree completely and believe F9 mode should be abolished and as soon as possible. This idea of playing the game, pausing it, adding a few items or making modifications, then resuming is certainly great, but done through this F9 mode it's abominable. Take Unity, for example. You can do all of this without an F9 mode. In fact, just to get to F9 mode we have to wait while Game Guru spends several minutes preparing the game to run. Whereas in Unity, you press play and it just plays immediately. In Unity, you not only have the great 3D editor with multiple perspectives like we so desperately need, but you can view the scene AND the running game at the same time in separate windows. And if I want to pause it, there's an actual pause button. Once paused, I can manipulate the scene any way I want and see the results instantly. I can even step forward frame by frame.
This is what we need. Not a more powerful F9 mode that takes 5 minutes just to get to. F9 mode is not liberating in any way. It is a great straight jacket. I hope others can see the value of a better system such as Unity has. After all, if this is supposed to be the easiest game maker, then it should at least be as easy to use as Unity.
System Specs: OS - Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1, CPU - AMD Phenom II X4 945, 3.0Ghz, RAM - 8Gb DDR3, GFX Card - 2048MB NVIDIA GeForce GT 640, FPSC-R Version - Beta 1.0085