Reached maximum allowed number of animations to preview?

Hi everyone,

I’ve got some problems in C2 preview (R244). The loading bar is red and the preview never starts. After doing a few tests, I noticed that when I deleted some animations of some newly added objects, the bar gets blue again and the preview works.

I tried recreating those objects from scratch, implementing all the animations again, but the problem is still there. Even weirder, if I delete the 2 problematic animations, then create new animations that have the same name (but are empty), the problem shows up gain, and disappear if I delete these empty animations.

I thought it could be the memory use, which is really high, but if I delete those animations, it work even if the memory use is higher than another file with the 2 animations in, but cropped so that the memory use is lower. That last file has always the red bar.

Lastly, recreating the object from scratch (it was a clone of a similat object that has no problem) and reexporting the images from Photoshop doesn’t help.

I did a very last test, and deleting a completely unrelated object actually solves the problem. Taking all this into account, it’s like my project reached the maximum allowed number of animations (??). Is there any kind of such limits? Ashley , could this be possible?

Any idea about how to solve this?

[Edit]

Previewing with NW.js doesn't work but previewing with Chrome does work. This is worrying as the game is planned to launch on Steam using NW.js. :-/

I made additional tests, it indeed seems to have a upper limit of animations allowed to be able to preview the project. Exported projects seems to work fine though (could this be confirmed by someone from Scirra?) but not being able to preview is quite annoying.

For NW.JS preview, the limit is around 5796 animations. It seems that 5796 animations always fails, while 5792 animations always work.

I've made a capx with 115 object of 50 animations each (49 are empty), and one object (Sprite 116) of 46 animation (total 5796), so you can test for yourself. Please note that despite the huge number of animations, there are only 2 sprites when exporting the project, as I used the duplicate animation and clone object to create them. The exported project is thus very small.

With Browser preview, the animation limit seems higher. With around 7500 animations, preview with Chrome and Edge doesn't work for me (just duplicate object in the capx to have the desired amount of object), but I didn't notice a limit to preview with Firefox, even with 8000 animations.

As a side note, Construct 3 previews perfectly even with 10,000 animations.

This is just another case of running in to the Windows limit of 10,000 graphics objects. C2 tends to create a couple of icons for each graphics object, so you tend to run in to problems around 3000-5000 animation frames.

It's a limit in the Windows OS which we didn't know about when we started C2. Long story short, we had to completely rearchitect the graphics pipeline in Construct to work around this. We did this for C3 with its in-editor spritesheeting engine, so it's fixed there. We will not be able to fix C2 though.

Thanks for the info. Good to know.

One last question, is the exported version going to work just fine or should I reduce the number of animation to avoid any problem?