Bone animation has incredible potential, but...

Hi,

Let me just jump on the bandwagon and say that this is an awesome addition to Construct. Here's some suggestions that to me would make it an indespencible tool. (I'm sure others have requested the same or similar.)

1) seing a preview of the animation you're making would drastically improve workflow.

2) if possible, a linear timeline type bar for navigating and moving/creating keyframes

3) the ability within the editor to switch any of the bone-animated sprites to a different animation at any keyframe

4) the ability to change the semitransparency and dimensions of an object per keyframe.

as you can tell, number 3 is especially important to me. Anyone who wants to know what I'm hoping to be able to do with bone animation, please go on youtube and check out gameplay footage of "Odin Sphere" for the ps2.

Odin sphere was an awesome game... I have to go back and finish it one day...

Along with the other 50 other games I have but haven't beaten.

the bone editor is a bit lacking in terms of ease of use, but its not really a big hinderance, these changes will probably have to wait for post v1.0

For #3, you can use the Bone Movement Behavior's 'compare animation frame' condition to change sprites animations at keyframes.

While I Think that the preview window would be awesome, I'd like to see the ability to duplicate an animation or be able to copy/paste frames.

Large bone movement behavior improvements for editing animations etc will probably have to wait till 2.0 when the UI can be properly redesigned.

Rich@ I advice you to check out Anime Studio Pro as a base for how bone movement editing it should work and look.

Well, that is a highly specialized animation software. Construct is a generic game development tool; bone animation is a much smaller part of the engine compared to Anime Studio Pro. How many games that use bone animation are there compared to games that do not?

Granted, having a more intuitive bone animation plugin would be nice, but I think it is not that important for Construct, which would benefit from many other additional features.

There would be alot more games that use bone style animation IF it were supported by common authoring tools. I guarantee you lots or maybe MOST of us will be using the bone animation in some or all of our projects.

In fact humbler versions of this style of animation are used constatly in developing for platforms where memory is limited. You'd be hard-pressed to find a good mobile or handheld 2d action game that isn't using this technique.

Well, that is a highly specialized animation software. Construct is a generic game development tool; bone animation is a much smaller part of the engine compared to Anime Studio Pro. How many games that use bone animation are there compared to games that do not?

Granted, having a more intuitive bone animation plugin would be nice, but I think it is not that important for Construct, which would benefit from many other additional features.

I haven't said that it should be axacly the same, but some of the GUI ideas, and some of/the most nessesary features could be 'nicked'

There would be alot more games that use bone style animation IF it were supported by common authoring tools. I guarantee you lots or maybe MOST of us will be using the bone animation in some or all of our projects.

In fact humbler versions of this style of animation are used constatly in developing for platforms where memory is limited. You'd be hard-pressed to find a good mobile or handheld 2d action game that isn't using this technique.

the bone editor is good enough to do anything as is, i believe everything should be doable in construct itself.

One thing I'd like to see is being able to control the bones through events, and making it so you can apply force to joints and move them based on conditions. That way you could make procedural animation that reacts dynamically to whats happening in the game rather than just having static looking animations.

Rich@ I advice you to check out Anime Studio Pro as a base for how bone movement editing it should work and look.

I know what you are getting at, but Anime Studio is actually rather dificult to use. The UI is not very user friendly, and the program itself is very fussy when it comes to the "order" of things.

Personally I would go for something more like Poser (in the way it keyframes and animates things). If the bone system could implement some kind of IK solver, as well as a keyframe jog/shuttle system, it would be bulletproof... not to mention awesome as hell.

~Sol