Animation Import Suggestion

Me again, just a warning, if you haven't seen it already, this is quite a wall. But please hear me out

I've suggested this before and I've had some devs say they like it but i haven't heard of any more progress on it. I didn't know whether or not to make a new thread or necro the old one so here's a new one as I don't know if I explained myself correctly last time

My suggestion is for those of us that like to render all our animation directions into one file/image series.

Eg: walking right, walking down, walking left then walking left - ALL in the one animation file/image series.

What I would like to see is on the import frames dialogue and option to create a new animation angle of X degrees every Y frames imported.

This would DRASTICALLY steamline the animation import process because as it stands, using the current method of importing animations, the user would have to:

1 - import the entire animation into ONE animation angle

2 - manually enter every new animation angle (no sweat you say? try having a 64 direction animation)

3 - Cut the required frames out of the main import animation angle and paste them into the correct animation angle

4 - repeat till finished for each animation

As you can imagine, for a sprite with 32+ animation angles and multiple animations, this could/does take a looooong time

With the proposed method the user would have to:

1 - Set the angle amount (hopefully with direction presets, eg: 2, 4, 8, 32, 64 directions)

2 - Set the amount of frames that equal one animation cycle

3 - click import

Quazi kindly told us that it is a common method in game making and that games such as Starcraft even imported their animations in a similar way.

This would make creating rendered sprites with many animation angles a breeze rather than a loathsome chore! And considering the tileset import does a -similar- type thing, I don't think it would be a huge hassle to implement.

The only problem I can see it having would be that it would require a simple maths check to make sure the numbers add up.

Eg: It should not allow a user to import an animation where the number of directions * frames per angle exceed the total frames to be imported.

Solutions to this could either be:

• import the amount of frames per angle until all angles have be filled, then discard any remaining frames left to be imported (this could also work if there are not -enough- frames for an entire rotation, just discard remaining animation angles)
• simply prompt the user that there are too many frames for that many angles, given the data entered and correct data needs to be entered before importing can succeed

Sorry bout the wall of text

Dev feedback? Is this already on the drawing board?

While I doubt the devs would add this feature soon (or ever...), it's likely that as construct gains popularity, someone with the coding know-how will be annoyed by the lack of this feature and make a plugin for it.

The merits of the idea are sound, obviously, and it'll probably be done one day.

However, do you really have 32 animation directions and multiple animations?

if he's planning on ripping, or rendering, then it's highly possible rich.

What game has 32 directions of unique angles which wouldn't look the same if rotated?

What game has 32 directions of unique angles which wouldn't look the same if rotated?

Isometric games like Age of Empires.

They have about 8 directions max surely? 32 seems excessive for anything.

32 might be a bit excessive, but 16 is would be great if you want high detail.

Isometric games go from 8 to 16.

16 could get really tedious I imagine. Specially if you just change something.

it's not that many unique animations, but I can think of a few good games with crazy amounts of rotations, mostly 16 bits racing games, like mariokart, and rock and roll racing for snes

red alert 2 has a nutload of images for each infantry unit. I imported one into construct a long time ago for fun, and the runtime took a while just to load the images of ONE UNIT. It was over 500 frames or something for a single 32x32 troop.

That's just ridiculous..

RA2 does use voxels I think as well.

i currently have one with 64 directions but i do believe that is a little excessive

but even with something like 16 which is what i'll probably end up using, it still would be a lot easier with the suggested method.

for anything isometric, simply rotating the sprite isn't really going to work well and if construct does get to the point where it can do iso games well, i can see this being a very useful feature

Edit: for the record, i'm rendering my sprites. not a huge fan of rips

RA2 does use voxels I think as well.

Yes, the vehicles use voxels, and thats about it. buildings, terrain, and infantry use hordes of raster data.

The first time I played the game I thought each vehicle had like 1000 frames, because when they move they conform to the iso terrain. Also, when explosions hit next to them, the vehicles tip as if the blast had nudged them. They look extremely like sprites and I wasn't expecting the game to use something as rare as voxels. It's a really fun game, all iso fans should try it out.