Animating in Construct and exporting it (game recorder)

I just wanna get some thoughts out regarding animating in Construct. Long story short, I recently got an offer (freelance work) to do some animations, and while I don't have major animation experience, I took the job regardless. Because that's how I roll. My first thought was to use Adobe Animate because... I don't know why, seemed to make sense. I hated it and couldn't get anything going. I tried some other similar software and also I again hated it. I was on the verge of calling the job off until I had a realization: Why am I not using Construct?

I haven't dabbled with the timeline at all yet but it's Construct, and so 20 minutes later I had my first small animation going. My spirits were up again and work went pretty smooth I have to say. There were some minor hiccups but nothing that I couldn't deal with.

Now the final animations were to be exported as video, which one would assume shouldn't be a problem using the game recorder feature. However, this is were the process started to get a bit iffy. I can't really fault Construct for that because it is a game engine and not a video editor. There were 2 issues with this.

1. I needed a 4k portrait mode export. However, the game recorder takes the resolution of the current device into account and I don't have a 4k screen. Luckily there is device emulation in Chrome where I can set the resolution to whatever I need and this works, except this feature is not available in Construct for some reason. I could have sworn it was available at some point, but currently it isn't. I do think it should be available though, because it's a very easy way to test multiple different screen resolutions/devices. I shrugged it off and just exported it where the device emulation is available again.

2. 4k... the game recorder absolutely tanks performance if it records 4k. Absolutely massive stuttering. Unuseable. Even in full HD it was noticably on the edge of stuttering. This one was a bit tricky to solve but I did eventually solve it. What I did was set the minimum fps, this results in a slowdown instead of stuttering during the recording. The resulting videos are now in slowmotion, which I then just further processed using ffmpeg and writing a little batch file to automate converting the videos to mp4 and also speeding them up. (for some reason I couldn't export to mp4 directly with the gamerecorder as it was "not supported") If anyone is curious, here's the ffmpeg line I used.

ffmpeg -fflags +genpts -i input.webm -r 60 -filter:v "setpts=0.15*PTS" output.mp4

So yeah... I used Construct for something that certainly isn't a game and I don't regret it. Clients were also very happy with the results.

What I'm wondering is though, is there any way to make the game recorder record a reasonably high resolution video without tanking performance. I guess it isn't really build for that but on the other hand, most games in fullscreen will run in full HD, and at that point it is noticably tanking the performance even when nothing is happening on screen. So if the idea is to use this as a replay feature or something, it should not impact performance in the way it is.

Also can we get device emulation back in the editor/preview :)

developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/device-mode

Cheers

Well I had some experience, I had the basic knowledge and such and did a bunch of hand drawn animations before. I wouldn't have taken it if I did not have any experience at all.

I actually thought of creating a "render as" option, I think it's possible. What I would have done was just stepping ahead 1 frame at a time, set timescale to 0, take a canvas snapshot and save it, set timescale to 1 for 1 frame and repeat. This would export a png sequence which most video editors can import quite easily afaik. But overall it would probably be a quite tedious process.

Shadowplay works but without a 4k screen it wouldn't have helped. As I said, the job is done and my solution worked really well all things considered. One downside would be that it's possible that the framerate fluctuates during the recording making some parts quicker than others. Luckily this wasn't the case for me or at least if it happend it wasn't noticable. The other downside is that you kind of have to estimate how much quicker you have to play the animations to get back to original speed, but that's just trial and error till you get the desired result.

I don't think we'll get an actual "render" function, that's just simply not the purpose of Construct. That's on me that I abuse Construct this way :)

Interesting feedback - thanks for sharing! As it happens we've been thinking about some features that might help with this kind of usage. Hopefully we'll have more to share later this year.

Note Chrome doesn't show device emulation mode for popup windows, but you can get it for tabs. So if you change the preview mode in Settings to "browser tab" then you can use device emulation mode.

Oh I see, yeah with browser tab preview it does work. I could have sworn I have used it with the popup before though, maybe they changed something.

Good to hear there is always some more new stuff in the pipeline :)