R0J0hound> Being able to draw paths for objects to follow would be cool. It’s the ultimate in “no programming required” to get things to move about. I’ve lost interest in making feature requests though. I’m more a try to make it myself now sort of guy, since I’m not very patient.
The existing solutions of using sprites to mark the path can look messy pretty quick.
As far as my ability goes i try to come up with my own solutions as well using the tools available. Either with events or other means.
As you point out... It's easy that things become messy when you create your own workarounds, of unsupported features.
With some math and expressions and dummy objects you could probably get things moving about the way you wanted. But in many cases you also want good visual representation of what's going on. UI handles for tweaking start and end points, shape of curves.
I've seen event based examples of things doing exactly that. but once again, messy, and leaves a lot of clutter in the layout.
One of the most interesting features Ashley has been talking about in one of earlier blog posts is the ability to pretty much "bake" events into some kind of component that can be reused, and shared.
Mentioned in this blog post. construct.net/en/blogs/construct-official-blog-1/the-future-of-the-construct-3-runtime-884
Modular event features, aimed at capabilities like building plugins out of events
As a big portion of the community probably don't do much coding, hence the choice of construct. This would open up the possibilites of sharing your event based solutions.
Which reminds me of another thing that would also be useful: Events for interacting with the editor itself. A good example is the "Particle Object" ... if you take a look at that built in plugin, there's a visual representation of the spray cone visualized by 2 red lines.
I would imagine that some kind of "Editor Plugin" you would be able to create visual representations and UI for your own solutions, that does not show in runtime. A way to create your own, handles for controlling variables.
As an example. Let's say you want to want to create your own, Spline movement plugin using events. With an "editor plugin" you could define a start and endpoint, and add a visual layout representation of those points, using the editor plugin, draw a curve between those points, or add all kinds of switches to visually control what's going on, instead of changing variables in your event sheet. They would show up in the layout editor, but they would not show in runtime.
While we're on the topic R0J0hound Ashley When you're creating your own plugin for C3. How do you go about creating something like the red lines showing in the particles plugin?
Events for n editor plugin would work something like this in my imagination.
Example1 :
Condition: Editor Object selected (UID)
Action: Display Checkbox at Sprite.X - 20, Sprite.Y-20.
Action: Set Checkbox description to: ("Toggle.")
This would create a checkbox near the location of a certain sprite, to toggle for example boolean variable for that object.
Example 2:
The editor plugin can be dragged like an object to the layout. In object properties your can choose what this instance is from a dropdown menu. Some useful things you could choose from that list is:
Crosshair , Checkbox, Line , rectangle, square, circle, slider bar, arrow, pie, angle (like the particles plugin), spline, indicator, handle, etc etc.
You can chose to render them for debugging purposes, you can choose not to render them to only use them in the editor to control things.
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Example 3:
Place a slider bar from the Editor plugin, in your layout, that is pinned to an object.
The slider can be used to control a variable or maybe opacity for that object, and will display any time that object is selected, or choose to always have it visible.
Dummy sprites NEEDS to go away, and we need a proper way to interact with what we create in the editor itself, not only in runtime.