Glide has seen some modest adoption despite the fact that I’ve barely made any effort to get the word out. A handful of developers have contacted me thanking me for the project and asking for help, which I’m always glad to offer. One issue in particular has come up a few times recently, and it relates to the way .NET handles structs.
Structs are passed and returned by value, not reference. This means that when you assign an instance to a variable, that new variable has no relationship to the original object; any properties set on it will only apply to that variable. This is a problem in Glide, since I have to store a reference to the tween’s target object in order to apply the transformations. Worst of all, while normally this issue would be caught at compile time, it’s impossible to detect when you’re using reflection to set values, and the resulting behavior was that the operation would appear to silently fail.
Today I made some changes that should help users realize when they’re attempting to tween an incompatible type. Passing an instance of a struct to the tweener will result in a compile-time error, and if you sneakily box your variable into an Object it will throw an exception at runtime. This still doesn’t solve the problem of how to tween these types of properties, but I’ve got you covered on that front as well.
Glide already has support for extension classes that allow you to add specialized behavior for tweening your own types, but this feature wasn’t really documented anywhere. Now it is! I’ve added a wiki to the Glide Bitbucket repository with an example showing how to tween an XNA Vector2. It should be pretty simple to modify for your own needs…maybe a StringTyper extension that causes letters to show up over time like a typewriter, or a GlitchString that fills the whole string with garbage and slowly fills in the correct letters.