C2 Wishlist

e1two , unfortunately I doubt Scirra can spend time ATM making C2 work better with something it's not designed to do.

Yep , and also take note that devs are poor and not a lot of them have PS installed , so Ashley might also need to implement that to every other image editor like GIMP , and hat would be a lot of problems ...

sogen , there are scripts that save automatically every element to .png , then you just need to import to C2

Hi,

Thanks for the quick replies.

Just about any bitmap painting app now exports layered psd's, from a five pound sketchbook pro on ipad to the full blown PS CS6 at 1500 pounds. So even poor amateur game creators would benefit from this feature.

As for having to apply features for different graphics apps, that doesn't really makes sense, as the importer shouldn't make any distinction where the psd came from.

But you are right about construct2 is maybe not conceived from the ground up to make storybook apps. That's not the impression I got from some of the other threads on the forum, saying that the engine was more than capable of doing so.

I would be happy for construct to flatten all layers to seperate png's and maybe do some cropping on import, nothing that hasn't been suggested on the forums already, as far as I can make out.

Thanks again for your answers,

e1

As someone that uses Photoshop on a daily basis, an importer would be a bad idea. The Adobe importers/exporters are bad enough (try exporting a layered Illustrator file that uses blending modes as a .PSD).

When developing a game, each sprite should be considered individually; how to minimise video memory, maximise reusability and maximise the appearance of diversity. Creating an importer would actively discourage close consideration of technical limitations.

Even so, having previously built a level editor as a Photoshop extension, you could very feasibly build a C2 exporter for Photoshop.

A lot of what you say makes sense for a straight up video game. For an interactive book diversity and reuse is a lot less of an issue.

As for an importer. I'm fine with cropping and exporting png's from photoshop. What is a real pain though, is having to reassemble your page layout from scratch in construct, if you have more than just a handful of layers

Could you tell a bit more about the photoshop level editor.

Sounds interesting.

e1

So even poor amateur game creators would benefit from this feature.

poor amateur game creators don't own photoshop, do they?

I would be happy for construct to flatten all layers to seperate png's and maybe do some cropping on import

that's definately photoshop's task! try to see this creatively. i don't know which version of ps you have installed, but check out the "scripts" menu under "file". it contains an option to flatten all layers etc.. do an animation with those and batch export to png/jpg.

and check out C2's option to duplicate layouts.. normally it should be a nobrainer to set up something like a scetchbook.

but besides that, i don't know if C2 is the perfect tool for such a task, because if you just want to click through some html pages, notepad++ is your best friend.

e1two what are your target platforms for this interactive book? I would be incredibly wary about using Construct 2 for interactive books on mobile platforms. Currently with no memory management on mobile you'll find you run out of video memory very quickly. People have tried this and run into memory issues mid development, so I strongly recommend researching limitations before starting development. You may have already done this, just a heads up if not.

The level editor I built for Photoshop used per-layer metadata to store layer variables, smart objects for instances and vector shapes for physics collision points. It exported Lua levels for Corona SDK. I wrote it in JavaScript, documentation was scarce when I built it so it takes some serious digging.

For the record, ludei is currently working on implementing memory management for c2, so it should become viable at some point.

Hi thehen

some good tips in your last post. I have read up on this and you are right, memory leaks are an issue in a lot of interactive books. I am currently using corona sdk and photoshop with kwik as a in-between gui.

So in some ways photoshop is already a level editor. However the loop to iterate interactivity is too long to make that an enjoyable process.

That's why I am looking into other 2D game engines to make this part quicker and more fun. I am not really a coder, so that makes me dependant on finding a visual coding solution, if not I could do all of this in corona. My target platforms are android and ios because of resolution and touch interaction.

Just to tie up a few loose ends :

There's at least five painting apps on ipad for under five pounds that export layered psd's

itunes.apple.com/us/app/procreate/id425073498

itunes.apple.com/us/app/brushes-3/id545366251

itunes.apple.com/us/app/sketchbook-pro-for-ipad/id364253478

I have used photoshop scripts before, to batch export jpg/png's. The problem is on the other end, when I bring it into construct. I don't want the the layout of my page to be messed up or having to redo it.

I don't know too much about construct2, so maybe I need to rethink how to proceed, based on your advice.

Thanks again for replying,

e1

hi man, I'm a Kwik refugee, I'm already liking SC2 a lot more.

My Wishlist:

• Construct 2 Linux Version
• Image Manipulation like Strech, Crop and so on
• Image Load Management
• Integrate Hash
• Better Advertising Support (Something like a ad Plugin)
• More Expressions for Strings
• The possibility to add text objects to a family
• The possibility to create own C2 Styles (Pink C2 would be amazing :D )

—: what string expressions would you need ?

Kyatric

I?m not sure which are in C2 but not all for sure.

There are many, here are some:

escape

unescape

toUppercase

concate

substr

fromCharCode

match and search with RegEx

split

This are just the ones I needed in my last project, I think there are more.For the most I found some ways to realize them but Built-In expressions would be great.

—:

System expressions

escape/unescape : I'm not sure but wouldn't URLEncode(str) and URLDecode(str) do the job ?

toUppercase : uppercase(text)

concate (concatenate ?) : & (ie "my first string " & " and my second string" => "my frist string and my second string")

substr : mid(text, index, count)

fromCharCode : it's not in indeed, but I made this alpha WIP plugin for that, still in development, use at your own risks.

I don't believe RegEx are supported, but you can use find(src, text) to get the index of the first occurrence of "text" and then use mid() to retrieve it.

For split I believe you can use tokenat(src, index, separator). Run a loop and set the tokens as values of an array.

You can find more explicit example of use of tokenat() in the how do I FAQ IIRC.

RegEx are much better than find, for something like emails and urls

And for the others, yeah they are possible but the right built-in expressions would be more comfortable.

Thanks for your answer and your great Plugin.

toUppercase is really there O.o I tought i tried it.