Construct Animate feedback thread

I don't think your ideas are bad, Tiny Martian.

Scirra are definitely assessing all feedback and it's in their best interest to execute this new product correctly, especially when they're stepping into new competitive territory.

If they don't acknowledge something you've said, don't worry! Maybe they can't acknowledge some stuff, because if they find that they cannot execute the idea correctly, then they will have to disappoint everyone that was hyped for it.

I have mentioned "drawing tools" twice, but I don't believe it's been acknowledged (IMO it's odd noone else has mentioned drawing tools? Don't animators prefer to draw their animations directly onto their background, rather than opening the sprite editor, drawing, then placing?). However, I keep it in mind that Scirra reads everything here and at least the idea is in their minds now. Do I even deeply care if drawing tools are added? No not really, I'm not an animator, but I do know 1 person that I could get interested in Construct Animate, but they immediately don't like the fact that they can't just draw an animation like Flash does. They like to look at the scenery/background and draw onto it with layers. Like how do you neatly animate 2 different people walking up to each other and then they shake hands? Well, without drawing tools, you could use the Image Editor and predict how to animate each sprite individually, or maybe do some awkward switch-over where the 2 people become 1 sprite once they are close together... Or, like, you could make the sprites in other software first, then import them into Construct Animate!... That'd be ridiculous if you need other animation software to use Construct Animate. Ahh sorry for going off on this point too much, but you see, perhaps I've convinced you how important this is, but I've posted 2 times about this, and no comment from Scirra, BUT they are aware at least.

Construct Animate must be easy and powerful to use, much like C3 is for game dev. Easy for a beginner, powerful for someone who's stuck with the software and mastered it. Any weird setups for a Timeline need to be addressed, and also, don't think that it's up to you or the community to find the solution to UI or UX problems in Construct Animate, like the whole "technically, what is the most bottom layer" question - Scirra are UI and UX designers, I mean the design of event sheet view is god-tier. They can solve it, that's their job, even if we feel like we must find solutions (we are all technical-minded problem-solving people, after all).

If they ignore issues that you post, then others will post the feedback too and maybe it will open their eyes to the idea. So it's always good to post feedback. Even if Scirra defend something, you should respond to that if you feel confident in your stance. We aren't here to fight or argue, we just want to explain our experiences and opinions to hopefully aid Scirra in making the right decisions for their software.

Sometimes a back-and-forth can entice others to jump in and pick a side - If everyone disagrees with you, then perhaps you might change your mind (or perhaps everyone is completely missing your point lol), and if everyone sided against Scirra view, then, well, we did our part as a community and its simply up for them to decide.

We are reading all the feedback in this thread and we're still interested in hearing more. However much like the feature suggestion platform, it's challenging to deal with the volume and scope of comments. People sometimes suggest things encompassing year's worth of work. It can be difficult both for users, and even for us, to establish how long anything will take or how feasible it would be. Some things would take several weeks just to review, understand, design a plan for, and investigate the necessary technical work involved. Often what sounds like a throwaway remark or a "simple" feature can open up a whole load of unexpected challenges, raise the prospect of fundamental redesigns, or have complicated tradeoffs like simplifying one specific type of use while making another type of use more difficult. All this plus the fact we get huge amounts of feedback and have limited time makes it difficult to respond to every single comment. However we are reading and we are interested in more feedback.

Just on drawing directly on the layout, I like the idea and I appreciate how it would be useful to animators who want quick results. However I think it would involve a fundamental reworking of the editor, which makes it difficult to act on. The Animations Editor is complex and has already had year's worth of development on it. It has loads of user interface sections that would be challenging to fit in to the existing interface without just making a complicated mess. It's also not clear to what extent its features apply to free-form drawing (what about frame-by-frame animations? what does cropping or resizing mean in a free form drawing? are collision polygons necessary to? etc. etc.) It would be good to discuss all this if we were building from the ground up. But the practical reality is we're working from the starting point of Construct 3. It would be much more feasible to think about how to make it easier to use what we've got. I know that imposes limitations, but meanwhile I've seen other animation tools that have nothing remotely sophisticated as Construct's Animation Editor for drawing and seem to rely largely on importing resources, let alone Construct's event sheets for interactivity or procedural logic. We're not trying to out-do Adobe Animate, just like Construct 3 isn't trying to out-do Unity. Our goal is to design something that is useful to at least some portion of the market, and I am confident we can do that, even if it doesn't do everything imaginable.

When I select multiple objects at the same time, the bottom information bar can shows how many objects I have selected at the time

XHXIAIEIN - this thread is intended for feedback specific to Construct Animate - if you have suggestions that apply to Construct in general it would be best to file them as suggestions normally: construct3-21h2.ideas.aha.io

Where are we supposed to report Animate bugs?

A report might be overkill, but it is a crash.

Just hitting enter after changing an animation name in the sprite editor. 💥

https://github.com/Scirra/Construct-3-bugs/issues/5974

reported and fixed for next beta already

https://github.com/Scirra/Construct-3-bugs/issues/5974

reported and fixed for next beta already

Cool, thanks.

twitter.com/pigmalien/status/1558846638080376832

Twitter does not like the default export of Animate's mp4.

Had to use one of those online converters.

Hi

Construct Animate Tools & Construct 3 Tools

Add Support Draw 2D slices sprite stacking technique To create Fake 3D sprite Object !

or

Add Support Import SpriteStack Tools .vox formats models !

Thanks!

Suggestion: recordable speech synthesis for video exports.

Tested for video length of four hours and the render failed to proceed past the first frame.

Tested for video length of three hours.

The export got to 100% and failed to close. Exporting to mp4, my Chrome had to two gigs of memory in my 8 gig system.

I may try the WebM later.

So I tried 2 hours with WebM

Just a thought:

Would it be possible to bypass the downloading, and have it save to a local folder automatically?

The video export process could be optimised to use less memory but it would be pretty complicated, and 4 hours does seem a lot - longer than a feature-length film! I think we will keep an eye on this and do some optimisation work if it becomes a real problem (and if anyone really does need a 4 hour export I'd be curious to know what it's for).