Hello Mr. Thomas and Mr. Ashley,
I would like know if a suggestion in the gadgets building system is welcome?
This is how Flash games are made, I used the Castle Crashers sprites to show how We work there, and is amazing how easy the learning curve is.
First, there you make the pin poing, nine of them are pre-established, but you can type a exactly number too. It look very similar to C2 xD
<img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/47035927/alignment.png" border="0" />
Them, you make the sprite a symbol, and attach it to another symbol, like in C2, using the pin.
But, is hard to figure out how it's going, or aligned, without a preview.
So, on Flash, you can build it and watch the animation, also, you can make ghosts of past frames and future frames, etc.
I believe C2 can be much better with a preview system like this, making easy the learning curve for pins and saving much time on Complex Multi-Sprite monsters and bosses =P
<img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/47035927/sample.png" border="0" />
(Please, ignore the text inside the image, I did it for a friend a long time ago.)
That image is not the best one to show. I'll try to describe it better.
In the animation editor, where you select the pin alignment, is okay, but, on the Main Canvas, where you place your boss, for example, and he will have body, head and a composite neck, build up with circles.
When you pin each one using code, you can preview them only when playing.
A specific area to preview and build composite things can improve much more Our job =P
Another example is when you're doing a game where you can change the pants. So, you set anchor points, and align each one using number in the source code, but when you wanna use the same "weapon" sprite, only re-sizing it a little bit and rotating it, you'll can save much bandwidth and work.
But, is near to impossible make it only using codes. An example to see the situation:
I did the castle crasher chacacter with his arms in a separated animation, pinned it to the body, pinned the sword to the arm, when I rotated the arm, the weapon will keep his angle, to make it show like the animation above, I need to Math his angle with the arm and the body, but when using the "gravity" angle different from 90? in the game, it become slight complex ^^
With the Composite gadgets preview, You can make options to change the anchored sprite angle according to the anchor sprite angle, and much more, looking forward, you can build the preview with sub-animations, where We can easily call it in the code, etc.
What do you think? xD