Sprite atlases / general flexibility

Hello everybody!

Just discovered Construct 2 and it seems really promising. I have been using the blitzbasic languages before and while they're very nice and capable I need something I can produce stuff with super-quick.

Before I dedicate lots of time to learning Construct tho, I'd like to ask a couple of questions about its flexibility.

First up: Sprite atlases. Unlike regular sprite sheets with even-sized cells, these consist of sprites of all shapes and sizes packed together on a single image to preserve memory. I got some hefty amounts of animation frames I'd like to use. Does Construct support this kind of thing? And if not, is it possible to script a drawing function that can draw rectangular regions from within an image to animate sprites?

Cameras: I'd like to have a 'lazy' camera that catches up with the player with a short delay, is camera behaviour fully scriptable? What about player/enemy movement? Can we set up control schemes and switch between them in realtime, either through script or the in-built functionality?

Thanks in advance. Sorry if these things have been asked a lot before.

Regarding 'sprite atlases' - there's no need to think about this while programming, and C2 automatically does it for you on export.

Regarding 'lazy camera' - easy peasy. I use it in my game AirScape. Fully scriptable.

Regarding control schemes - yes and yes.

Thanks, that's good to hear :)

You might be interested in this blog post covering Construct 2's automatic spritesheeting feature.

Cheers, I also checked out the images in an exported project. Looking good but are image sizes customizable? Didn't look like it in the blog post. If not then no biggie.

ErekT - they're not customisable I'm afraid, but for the reasons the blog post outlines the 512 size probably makes the best tradeoff, so I think you'd want to stick with that anyway.