My Impression + My 2c about C2

I've been playing with C2 for the past week or so. I was very impressed with this environment and in a day or two I'll purchase my license.

I was able to create cool mechanisms, game ideas and other interesting thing to play with.

If this environment keep growing, keep adding new things and feature I see bright future for C2.

I've compiles a short list of things I wish to see happening, minor things I wish to see fix and in general some minor edges I think should be polished.

If some of the points I'm mentioning were mentioned before, simply skip them. So here goes my initial 1.5 cents:

• Zorder in Editor - Currently one can only move to top/bottom. It would be great to have forward/back which will allow steps
• PickTop - it would be great to be able to pick only the top object from a selected bunch of objects
• In some intro text I saw "small company who enjoys...". English is not my main language (as you probably figured it out) but shouldn't it be "which" instead of "who"?
• Object resize handles - Resizing the width of an object in the editor shows the wrong arrow handles
• Resizing several objects at once - In Editor
• Align/Distribute objects in Editor
• Refresh options for a sprite - Seldom I find myself changing a sprite image/file and than have to find the sprite specific frame and upload the image again. A simple "refresh graphics" option will make life better
• Setting the default browser from within C2. My default browser is IE (here, I've said it :) and each time I'm creating a new project I have to change this field
• Same goes with resolution. It would be nice to set these as default from within C2. These changes will save time and annoyance dedicated to this ceremony
• Too many clicks in Image Edit - When I'm editing a sprite I encounter too many clicks when pressing one of the 3 windows. When I'm in the main window and press a single frame in the frames window the first click doesn't do much beside change the focus to that window. The second click will pick the right frame
• Scrolling doesn't work well when moving one frame of a sprite to the top of the list. This force the user to drag/drop, scroll, drag/drop, scroll, etc.
• Timer Object - This will be cool. Timer object will have the time, how many repeats, inner counter and a small event sheet of code to carry out
• Text/Vars object - The Var and text displayed are linked. No need to add the same code each time. Simply name the object and it will store the text as Var and show the stored Var. This object would help debugging
• Some windows don't allow changing the size of thumbnails

I think I covered it for now.

Hope It's not too much for a first message :)

Keep up the great work! <img src="smileys/smiley32.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

Thanks for the suggestions! We're very busy, but we'll try get on top of these soon. Which windows don't allow changing the thumbnail sizes by the way?

"Objects with expressions" for example.

At the moment when I see this window open, I have a huge window with thin line or two.

Even with projects which have tons of objects a bigger thumbnails would be much better.

- Refresh options for a sprite - Seldom I find myself changing a sprite image/file and than have to find the sprite specific frame and upload the image again. A simple "refresh graphics" option will make life better

+1000 !

It's a (little) waste of time when you design a Sprite, insert it in the game, and see in the previous windows that you forgot to color a couple of pixels or add the transparency color... An option to automatically reload the Sprite would be great.

Setting the default browser from within C2. My default browser is IE (here, I've said it :) and each time I'm creating a new project I have to change this field

- Same goes with resolution. It would be nice to set these as default from within C2. These changes will save time and annoyance dedicated to this ceremony

Aren't both already accessible from the project properties ?

Also if IE is the default browser, the "default browser" value in "Project browser" should run IE by default.

Sounds like you use IE, but it is not really set as default in the end.

For the resolutions, same thing, those are properties from the project.

Or I missed your point.

You missed both my points :)

IE is the default browser but I preview C2 games with Chrome. IE doesn't work for HTML5 on my machine.

I want to be able to set the default as Chrome for C2.

The second point is to be able to set the default resolution to other than 640,480.

Each time I create a new project I go and change the browser from default to Chrome and than go to the resolution and change these to 800,600.

I suggested a "configure" option from within C2 which will remember the settings I use for the creation of new project.

Imagine each time you start using your browser you had to manually set your favorites...

Kyatric He means he wants to change what the initial settings are when starting a new project, not change them via the properties panel.

I honestly don't see why this is necessary though. Yeah it would be kind of nice but it takes 10 seconds to change the settings via the properties panel.

"Imagine each time you start using your browser you had to manually set your favorites... "

I don't see how that relates. You only have to change the properties ONCE when you start your project. It's more like setting your browser options.

:) Software, no matter what brand and field, have defaults. These defaults can be removed by saying "these small changes take 2 seconds" but they keep releasing software with default settings.

It makes life easier and that's what software are for.

When I use Word and start a new document the program "knows" which page layout I prefer, is it landscape or otherwise, if I prefer the default font to be 10p or 14p, etc, etc.

The same goes with Photoshop, it knows I prefer a X by Y pixels empty document.

I know it's only 2-10 seconds for each new project but it's not the point. The point is to enhance C2.

Btw, when you restart an OS it does remember your resolution. Just image you had to change it each time you start your computer session.

Btw, I found this sentence in the "index.html" file:

This file will have been minified and obfuscated if you enabled

For some reason it burns my ears. Is this future past progressive?

Again, the blame could be in my non-English brain.

HotGod you can create a project with your favourite definitions and save this as a template, then when starting a new project use this and save in the final location.

Thans cesisco, I'll give it a try.

A point about the too many clicks : That's because the image editor uses separate windows so every time you have to click on them two times to regain focus. Imo it should all be put in a single window. Like it was in Classic. In fact the way it was in Classic was almost perfect. Another thing i'm missing is the ability to copy frames between animations.

I'm sure it's an easy fix. One can check the mouse position and simply grant the focus to the window currently under the mouse.

I'm sure it will be fixed but I'm also sure this minute fix was added to a very long small changes list.

Since you've mentioned the frames window I'll mention another cool thing I think should be introduced: a save/load of objects.

Imagine after creating a cool sprite with all the frames and points you simply save it to your directory for use in other projects or even to share with friends. This will allow a creation of ready-to-use objects.

Yes yes. Now that you mentioned it : Two buttons: 'export animations in separate images', with each animation in its folder and another button 'export animations as spritesheet' , either with one sprite sheet for each animation or everything into one big sprite sheet. Then when working on another project or even another engine just import the sheet.

About the windows, yes, auto-focusing is a solution, but imo integrating everything, if possible, would be better.