Hi guys!
Since I'm getting deeper into Construct, I've started to work on sections of the software I still wasn't used to, and I guess I have a nice suggestion to the animation part.
I've been working for about 6 months with the Playground SDK, a free game SDK from Playfirst for developing casual games, and on the games I'm making, we constantly need to create simple animations without having to use too much frames (the engine currently supports animation strips of 1024x1024 max, and our sceneries and objects were quite big).
Their animation program, called "filmstrip", can read easy LUA scripts that organize frame number and delay. I really enjoyed it, and I think something similar could vastly improve how we deal with animation in Construct.
The script is simply a function with delays and frames, for example, a walking animation with 10 frames has a script sorta like this:
-Walking
delay(60)
frames{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10}
If I wanted to make a character swing a sword, with a little antecipation on the movement, I'd say:
-Swing
delay(40)
frames{1,2,3,4} <--- draws the sword
delay(150) <---- wait for it...
frames{5}
delay(10) <---- quick slash!
frames{6,7,8,9}
delay(70)
frames{4,3,2,1} <---- returns sword more slowly.
I found myself using this for background and idle animations to... for example, if I have a dog that wags its tail, barks, and looks around, I could create, with the same frames, not only the idle animation of the dog (that involved the wagging and looking around and barks a bit) but also each separate animation, using the same frames I originally had from my strip.
I don't know how construct interprets equal frames, but I often use the same frame in the middle of my animations, so I end up having to copy them over and over. Using this "pool" of frames, We could easily create animations without having to re-import them, use size and texture resources, and so on.
What do you guys think? Have I made myself clear? I'm not a programming expert, and english's not my first language
Please comment on this!