joelmayer's Forum Posts

  • If you want to know more about how a timeline works, maybe it would be beneficiary to look at a few tutorials of pretty much ANY animation software like After Effects, Adobe Animate or Moho.

    The exciting thing about the timeline is, that you can do your tweening animations inside the layout editor and see an instant preview. You can add multiple timelines so my guess is you can make like different timelines for like i.e. a sprite floating into the screen and one when it floats out of the screen and then call upon them via code. What's also neat is that the keyframes seem to have indexes so i certainly hope there will be a way where we can call upon actions to happen on specific keyframes within a timeline.

    It's kind of the early Flash/Macromedia Director way of doing interactions. You should be able to animate pretty much any property such as scale, position, opacity etc. and just do it in a much more intuitive way than to code it, test it, see that it looks wrong, change the code, test again, etc.

    Currently it's really just an experimental feature and i couldn't get it to work. It still needs some usability iterations and, of course, bug fixes until it's fully functional but i think it's a great addition to make C3 even more powerful. Whether you want to use it or not is, of course, entirely up to you in the end :)

  • Aaaah i see :D Well sorry then, got it wrong haha.

  • Yes but i think the idea is that you stream games from Xbox Live to basically any device possible. Question is, what format do these streaming games need to be. I'm guessing they are in some sort of Windows format? But maybe i'm getting it all wrong, i don't know :D

  • Hi Guys

    Just saw this:

    https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/02/04/microsoft-expanding-xbox-live-to-nintendo-switch-and-mobile

    And was wondering what your thoughts were? Would this mean that, theoretically, C3 games could be played on the Switch as well? How is UWP/Xbox performance these days? I think it's a nice step by Microsoft and might make developing multi-platform games a whole lot easier for the future :)

  • I think this actually an area where C3 really has undiscovered potential. I use it at the office a lot for any kind of communication Materials, that have nothing to do with games i.e. one time i programmed an interactive display with it for a product convention.

    Right now i'm working on an interactive application for the HR department which they will hand applicants on an iPad while they're waiting for their job interview. That will be fun as well and it's super easy with Construct. Also used it in my post-grad as an interaction designer as a prototyping tool since i wanted to present some interaction stuff that wasn't possible to show off with tools like Sketch or AdobeXD.

    So yeah, for anything that goes beyond pretty standard websites or apps it's cool to use as a mockup tool and even for interactive stuff for clients that aren't games. For me, it's kind of the modern Macromedia Director substitute :P I hope they implement the Timeline feature one day, then it REALLY would be like Director! :D

  • They said something about "rudimentary 3d capabilities" being planned for the future but that is more about having some Z-depth. I'd rather have C3 concentrate on being a well made 2D engine and 3D is a whole different beast.

  • Hi Nepeo

    Thanks for your feedback:

    About 1. , it's really more a nice to have feature than anything else and i guess, since this a niche request anyway your resources are probably better used elsewhere :) The fact that i can copy and paste in any way is already a huge plus.

    3. You're right, i just tried with Sheets and there it works but for some reason it doesn't with Excel, which is really weird. I downloaded and tried LibreOffice as well now and it seems there it doesn't reckognize empty cells at all. Copy pasting cells with content though works :) Don't know what's up with the empty ones in either Excel or Libre Calc...

    Thanks!

    Edit: Sorry overlooked the last part: i think the tiling is probably an overkill and i personally wouldn't see any use for it.

  • Hi Nepeo

    Thank you so much for the implementation of the Copy pasting from and to the Array Editor :) I'm happy to report that it works with Microsoft Excel as well (at least on my Mac, which is kind of ironic :D Wasn't able to test it on a Windows machine).

    I'd have a couple of improvement suggestions for the future maybe:

    - This one i actually expected: If i copy and paste an area from my spreadsheet software to the data editor, it would be awesome, if the editor resized to the pasted data area. Meaning, if i have a 3x3 cells area in the C3 editor and my copied data from the spreadsheet is 4x2 it would widen the data editor to 4x3 (only for expanding the editor it wouldn't have to shrink it down. Hope that makes sense.

    - Right now i don't seem to be able to delete multiple selected cells at once. When i select an area with the shift key and then hit delete with the selected cells, it only deletes the active one, not the whole selection area, which would be the expected behaviour.

    - When i copy and paste an empty area from a spreadsheet over to the data editor (with multiple rows), it only pastes the first row and doesn't overwrite anything underneath it. Meaning, if i got a filled up 5x5 cells sheet in the data editor and i copy and paste a 5x5 empty cells area over it, it only overwrites the first row with empty cells.

    Thank you though for a great initial (and extremely fast) implementation for this request!

    Best,

    Joel

  • Oh wow thank you so much Nepeo, i look forward to trying this out!! :D

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  • Hi Nepeo

    That would be incredible!! It would basically substitute for the CSV plugin by rex that i used up until now and of course, the very convenient array editor would be great to use in the engine itself with just the ability to export and import stuff from it (preferably from a CSV).

    I think sticking to just the most widespread standard would suffice and as long as you can open and edit it in MS Excel or Google Spreadsheets i think everybody would be happy :)

    Thanks for considering it!

    Edit: Also just an idea, i really don't know if it would be easier/harder to implement than a full-blown csv export/import function: i just found out that i can copy and paste cells between Google Spreadsheet and Microsoft Excel and vice-versa. Maybe, if it is easier to do, it would be cool if you could select multiple cells in the Array Editor and just copy paste them over to a Spreadsheet program as well as the other way around... ? Just a thought ;)

  • Which means more moneys for Scirra :) I myself will stick with the yearly subscription but i use C3 pretty regularly and can afford it so.

  • Monthly subscriptions are actually a good business strategy as well... Adobe does it as well as quite some other software or online services i'm using. Might lower the hurdle for people to get into C3. Some even just offer like quarterly subscriptions of three months instead of monthly. Obviously, the yearly subscriptions will stay the best deal, broken down to individual months, which is pretty common too.

  • Hi guys thanks for all the replies!

    I think i found a solution using Arrays, seems i was kinda stupid plus even though i used Construct intensely for a while now, still learning ;) Will definitely keep an eye on JSON to learn further down the line but i think i found a way of doing it with Arrays. Now if only there was a way to import my CSV to the Array editor :D

    EDIT: Actually, this is slightly off-topic, but i got another question regarding the Array Editor:

    Since i'm having all my dialogue proofread and everything, to send it to an external translator it would of course be much more convenient to be able to export this JSON as a CSV, so, same story again :D Anyone having any experience with a good tool to convert the Array JSON to CSV and back?

  • Hi there!

    I'm currently in the process of deprecating some 3rd party plugins from my game so i can move over to the new C3 runtime. One of which is rex's CSV addon, which served me greatly in the past to call DialogueLines for Cutscenes in my game.

    Why not just use an array?

    Now, people often suggest i should just use an array and the array editor but here's the problem:

    I tried that but i can only call upon data based on an Index value whereas with the CSV Addon i can call upon date based on their column- and row-names. So let's say i have Dialogue_Line_1 through 8. I just call upon a variable that determines the dialogue name and add a "_1" to it. So it always starts the right one. Each dialogue line then calls a function when the user presses space. That can either be advancing to the next line or ending the dialogue or whatever function you might want (i.e. the character moving around the screen after a dialogue has ended etc.).

    Now let's assume i've written 300 lines of dialogue (which is what i about have by now) and want to add a line to the Dialogue_1 row. I just insert a row, renumber the cells in the csv and everything still works, because it calls upon the Cell Name and not an index. If i would do this in an array, it would obviously screw up the index numbers of all following lines of dialogues and i would have to go through the entire game and renumber the index which is being called upon. This, of course, is very unfeasable. So CSV worked really great for me thus far.

    Now to the actual Question:

    I've seen some CSV to JSON converters online. Is there a way, with which i could use the new JSON addon to call upon individual "cells" of the csv (now in JSON) form? In that case, i wouldn't need the CSV addon anymore. Unfortunately, i have zero experience with any JSON addon from Construct and the documentation for it doesn't seem to be available by now.

    Hope this makes sense and i'd be glad to elaborate if something's unclear. Kind of a difficult problem to explain but maybe someone can just give me a crash rundown on how to use the JSON addon (calling upon data (i think i would need the Get Path or something?)etc.) and i might be able to figure it out myself :)

    Thank you in advance!