Construct Animate feedback thread

twitter.com/q3olegka/status/1531909814804025350

Could you please vote on twitter about C3 and CA? It would be interesting

and you need to take into account the limited resources of the team and what in your opinion they need to spend these resources first

Ashley and the rest of the Scirra team have handled C3 perfectly for years and C2 before that. Why do you think they can't handle another app? If they need more people to work on the app, they hire more people. Simple as that. It's a business. Let them do their thing. They are very good at it.

They have 10 years 2 developers, bro. That's the problem. Their company could grow several times during this time. Their development could grow several times and they could safely engage in other projects, such as CA. That's why there are so many unfriendly comments.

But we have always supported scirra. And I paid them all this time. But I do not saw the expansion of the company and the opportunities that each engine already has in 2022, but not C3. Ashley did not want to add 3d at all, but then he added and received the most positive feedback from users. So they are often very wrong

My company, where I have been working for 5 years, has grown from 5 employees to 30. And its profit has grown significantly. We could also stay with 5 employees and make a profit and say that we are doing well. But this does not compare with how much we can do with 30 employees. And scirra remained at the same level as 5 years ago. So think about it

Recommendation:

Commission some professional animator to create some animation templates.

For example, use them to make some story. It would be better if it could include some body movements, text dialogue, cutscenes, camera changes

As they make it, let them provide editor feedback on their use. I think their experience will be more in line with expectations

CA suggestions:

In the timeline toolbar, displayed current parameter and allowed to edit.

I don't need to think for a few seconds what the X value is now, where can i edit it ? The eye only needs to focus on 1 place, instead of looking to the left, looking up, and looking at the canvas in the middle. Currently, my eyes have to look at 3 places at the same time.

Also solved 1 problem, I can edit the value of X just need to check the properties of the timeline. Currently, I have to select the object before I can edit the properties.

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Off topic, I suddenly thought of a book 'Don't Make Me Think' by Steve Krug. recommended reading. may be helpful for the interactive experience of your design tool

In fact, I would call 'Construct Animate' as 'Construct Lite', just like the way Starbucks markets its medium, large and extra-large cups. You know, CA is not aimed at professional game developers, but teachers who only need a small part of C3 for making interactive type videos or applications.Its functions are separated from the C3, but the price is less, and it is more conducive to marketing.That's why CA is not a dedicated plugin, but another product.

I don't think it distracts from scirra because Construct Animate is mainly being developed by Diego. And Ashley has been focusing on C3 feature. so that he can keep 2 software updates going weekly. For now, updating CA is actually updating C3 Timeline, so it won't have any impact.

Ok so now I explained as other people why we think 2 products at the same time for 2 devs could be counterproductive, I'll now propose ideas that I think could greatly benefit both products, as we all hope Scirra will succeed with their projects, and be able to grow and hire new developers on the engines as they’re planning to do.

I think the deal is fair as long as promises are kept. Which means :

- Scirra dev team will grow,

- Construct Gamedev isn’t affected in any way in its development so game-specific features continue to be added in the engine and remain the priority,

- Most of the new CA features benefit both products so are useful and relevant for us faithful gamedev customers paying our subscription.

I agree with many feature ideas proposed by other users in previous post (direct preview and edit of Ease curve in Properties View for example), I’ll just suggest additional ideas (most of them also benefits regular Construct) :

1. Add a Hierarchy View to enhance the workflow of creating hierarchies by simply dragging and dropping instances on top of each other in this dedicated view.

It would also allow users to find, order and select Instances in a convenient way without needing to lock layers on top to be able to select instances directly in the layout view.

Hierarchy is at the core of Animate so it deserves UX enhancements.

Why ? Right now the workflow that consists in selecting child then parent and then right-clicking parent to open a context menu and only then create the hierarchy is not intuitive. Also green arrows are confusing regarding which object is parent and which object is the child.

Dedicated suggestion : construct3-21h2.ideas.aha.io/ideas/C321H2-I-311

2. Add “Animation Trigger Events” to Frames in the Animation Editor.

As one of the best USPs of Animate seems to be related to the possibility to execute logic from Eventsheet during the “Movie” (in addition to the usual Timeline workflow most Animation software have), it would be nice if we could trigger events from specific Frames of any Sprite animation.

For example in the Animation Editor, we could right click any frame to open the context menu where a “Add Animation Event” button could be added. The animation Event would be a string (=Tag). We could then execute logic in Eventsheet thanks to a new “On Animation Event {Tag}” trigger condition for Sprites.

There could also be a new dedicated "tool button/icon" on the left toolbar of the animation event. It would be similar to the "Edit Image Points", it would be a list of all Animation Events ("Tags") on that specific frame.

There would be autocomplete feature both ways, in the dedicated Trigger Event in eventsheet (most important) but also in the Animation Editor. So already used Tags are suggested to avoid mistakes.

Example use case : I have a character running in my Movie (8 frame animation) and I want to add small Dust FX at each of his footsteps. The process to add this small FX manually at the right frame on the Timeline would be really tedious. I could just add a “Step” Tag on the 2 frames where the character foot touch the ground and spawn my FX on a dedicated image point thanks to a On Animation Event “Step” Trigger condition in the event sheet.

3. “On Timer {Tag} Start”, “On Tween {Tag} Start” condition events. For the same reason (one USP of Animate being Event Sheets), I can think of a lot of cases why I would use Timer and Tween behaviors on top of Timelines in my Movie, for some specific things it’s really more convenient.

For the same reason it is very useful to have “On {Tag} running”, “On {Tag} Finished” (that already exists in Construct), we need a “On {Tag} start”. Indeed the same Timer or Tween Tag can be called from multiple places and it would be handy if we could avoid duplicating the logic that needs to happen when that Tag is started thanks to those new Behavior Conditions.

4. Nomenclature (Name-based) bulk import for Spritesheets. A big amount of frame by frame Animators prefer to work with Spritesheets to export/import their work (way easier for file management to have only 1 file). Right now if i want to make a Movie with my spritesheets animation, i have to manually import each spritesheet and specify the number of columns of the number of rows. It would be handy if I could just name each of them AnimationName_XxY where X is the number of columns and Y is the number of rows, and there would be an option to bulk import sprite sheets based on their name.

5. Resize Image Canvas > Image > Align Image Point

When Resizing an Image, on the Dedicated pop-up menu (“Resize Image Canvas”), add the option to “Align Image Point” in the “Image” drop down list. As it works with “Align with Center”, but based on an Image Point. This is needed really often.

When “Align Image Point” is selected, it adds a number field to choose which image point should be considered.

6. Shortcut to Snap Polygon Points and Image Points to integer Positions

If the user press MAJ (or CTRL?) while editing the Collision Polygon Points or Image Points position, it will snap the currently selected poin to the closest integer position :

-> Image Point Edit: when the user is in Image Point edit mode, if they click anywhere on the image, it immedialty update the point position to the position they just clicked. With MAJ, it would the closest integer position instead.

-> Collision Point Edit : when the user is currently dragging a point of the polygon, if MAJ is pressed it's only moving from integer position to integer position.

Why ? 95% of the time, we want those points to be placed at integer positions. Right now the click-to-place/drag-to-move points feature always place points at non integer position so we can't really use them and we need to specify X and Y values in corresponding field each time instead. Which is really tedious and time consuming.

7. Fix the Drawing Canvas : construct3-21h2.ideas.aha.io/ideas/C321H2-I-226

8. Enhance Pixel Art capabilities for both Animate and Gamedev Construct by adding a new effect that would allow to merge “pixel-perfect with smoothness.”

It would solve a very old issue for Gamedev Construct + it would allow the use of Animate as a tool to create pixel art FX, character animations and pixel art movies, by pixelating shapes, and interpolating them. It would allow us to have clean text and smooth scrolling for pixel perfect stuff even at non integer positions.

It could be a nice USP for Animate as a lot of Animation tools don't have any pixel art friendly features (I know it because as a customer i didn’t find it in potential competitors of Animate), and there is an overlap between people interested in Pixel art animation and people interested in making indie games.

Dedicated suggestion, explaining in details the issue and implementations ideas for this new effect : construct3-21h2.ideas.aha.io/ideas/C321H2-I-317

(Recently some successful apps with pixel animation features started popping, and it could be an inspiration for some features by the way : Aseprite, Pixelover deakcor.itch.io/pixelover, Pixel FX Designer codemanu.itch.io/particle-fx-designer, )

(it's weird but i've never had access to the "Edit Post" feature for Forum posts, no matter what device (PC/Mac/Phone) and what browser (Chrome/Edge/Firefox) I use, no matter if I'm in incognito mode, if I disable all chrome extensions or not. So pardon me if there are a lot of typos as I can't edit and preview my forum posts)

EDIT : Nice, i can now edit my post

There has been a few suggestions talking about mesh distortion in the timeline, this is a common feature in other animation software and would be very powerful.

But sadly there is one big concern, that needs to be adressed, before adding it to the timeline would even make sense to me.

Construct currently draws tris instead of quads

this leads to the texture looking off in a lot of cases, this is very undesirable as the usage of mesh deformation in the timeline would mostly be for visuals. (even the advertised examples by construct for using mesh don't work well for that reason, unless you want your textures to look terrible.)

This problem would be fixed if the drawQuads method would be used instead

Example to visualize the problem, if it's still not clear I can add more examples.

You might argue, just add more points, but this would be bad for performance as well as would make it insanely difficult to edit and place the points.

If tris need to stay we would need a way to add edges to the mesh in user defined placed (look at spine) so we have control over where the edges are and with it where the mesh should bend. Currently we can only place them in a perfect grid.

http://de.esotericsoftware.com/spine-meshes

But for transforming a grid quads are the better solution.

should be allow to scaled from objects borders, as Photoshop, instead of 8 endpoints, which works great on some large objects. such as backgrounds, sky, textures.

Because when you have a large object and then zoom the editor view big, you have a hard time finding the endpoints.