Found yet another bug with this program. If you have triggers such as sound triggers or event triggers and keyframes (presumably during the same time as a trigger) with the easing curve set to "instant" the triggers will activate many times. You can test this by just making a CAPX with a sound real quick and trying it, but if you really need a CAPX we'll try to get one over when we can

I really just wanted to warn the public of this because it caused us endless amounts of grief, I debugged the game, plugin, SCON file, and SCML file, possibly in that order, I don't even remember anymore, and I only found the issue by using super-old-fashioned debugging methods I've been using for almost half my life, lol. It should have been much more obvious, but sometimes when you assume two things are unrelated, or make changes you *think* are small, surprises come up. XP

Just to be sure, this is a bug with the plugin, not the program, right?

Hey lucid thanks for the update! It seems to work great aside from one thing: character maps. I've used them plenty of times before, but I can't seem to get any character maps to appear in C2. It always just shows the default. I've e-mailed you a minimal C2 example showing it so you don't have to, but choosing to append a character map does nothing with the new rendering method.

hey — I took a look at your capx. The issue is that the file hasn't been loaded yet at start of layout, so it doesn't yet have the character maps to append. If you change 'Start of Layout' to scml - 'On Initialized' it works as expected.

Will this ever be updated to the Steam $25 version?

StarCS - Actually this is the same version. We just forgot to update the price here. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

— - I responded via email.

Just updater the scml plugin, error~~

The image is broken for me, but I think I know the error you're referring to.

If you're not planning to upgrade your project to the new method, please use this version of the plugin until I find a solution to the issue.

lucid - Thanks for the fix.

Edit: The Spriter Animation still doesn't change opacity.

Whoops, forgot to actually upload it. It should work now.

— . K, the opacity thing is fixed. Will have to look further into the image/nametag thing. Don't want to use the spritesheet if possible, and haven't found a way to retrieve the name at edittime yet.

— - not a noob question at all. I actually meant to add a feature to remove items like this if you manually choose to (there are cases where you want to save the images' set pivots for later), but now that you mention it, I never got around to it. If you want to send me your project to with a list of files that shouldn't be there, I'll see if I can manually remove them for you. As long as the project isn't too huge it should be doable. If I'm not able to, I'll make sure to get the purge unused images feature into the next build of Spriter.

rexrainbow - just stopped by to say, when looking through customer's capx's for support reasons, I often need to download your plugins. You're quite prolific! Also, this app is ridiculously useful. Keep up the great work.

BBaller1337, renaming in the z-order list does work correctly for me, even when loading your project

—, it shouldn't place images in the spritesheet unless it's included in the project for some reason, like if you set their pivot point or used them in a character map.

Thanks everyone, glad you're enjoying the new build.

any good tutorials on best practices for collision boxes? Sounds like it's actually pretty confusing for a few users.

BBaller1337

mudmask - I don't think we have an in depth tutorial on collision boxes in C2 itself aside from what's in the tutorial thread linked in my signature, but it's actually pretty simple. First, the recommended method for doing something like using your entire character with platform behavior is just to pin the scml object to a dummy sprite (which is how it's usually done for regular sprites in C2 as well). If you want separate animate-able collision boxes, this works using the old method of importing. Import your project, and Construct 2 will create invisible sprite objects with the names of your collision boxes. Simply check for collisions the way you would on any sprite in C2, and since everything is in a group, it should automatically pick the correct instance of your scml object for further actions.

Unfortunately, there are no plans to add collision boxes directly into the new direct drawing mode, as it's a bit of a slippery slope, where updates to C2's collision detection methods will always necessitate changes to the plugin's as well, and I would expect it to get messy and potentially cause performance issues. For anyone curious, there is actually a hybrid way to import now, which is a bit tedious, but I will explain it in case anyone wants to use direct drawing mode with collision boxes, or even with collideable sprites. First, save your project normally, and then save a spritesheeted project. Import your non-spritesheeted project the old way. Follow the old to new style project conversion steps, but this time only delete everything except collision boxes, and other sprites you want to test for collisions. This should self draw the animation, but also animate the separate sprites and collision boxes you kept. Keep in mind, the zorder will not place sprites correctly inside the self-drawing scml object, so it's probably only useful for making invisible sprite objects for collision detection.

EDIT: lucid sent the e-mail

Thank you. I will look into it and respond as soon as I get a chance.

Looking for a method where the recolor is purely visual so it should reuse all the same other data, but without me having to update changes constantly, if possible. Let me know if you have any ideas.

The best method is to recolor the individual images, and then use character maps to share the animation data and to switch colors on the fly in C2. A tutorial for character maps in C2 is in the main tutorial page linked in my signature, and more information about character maps in Spriter can be found under Help in Spriter.

I remember seeing a post or something for how to preload animations (or something like it) to help the game run faster, but I can't find it. Anyone know what I'm talking about or just have some tips? I'm really struggling on optimization here.

You can try the new method of importing, which has faster performance:

My other question is if it's better to have a spriter object have a separate object for each animation (so in C2 an idle animation would be one sprite object and a run animation would be another one), or to have one object for all animations.

It's best to have one scml file (and one scml object in C2) for each character (or machine, or any individual animated object).

lucid - How do we spawn object by image point using this new plugin? Is there a new way? In the past plugin I made an image point on the separate sprites in order to spawn objects for example gun sprite on a spriter object to spawn bullets. Thanks.

—, you would have to use Spriter's action point feature. which let's you place named points, and optionally attach them to bones and animate them. The main tradeoff for using the new self-drawing mode is that you don't get the advantages of having separate C2 objects.

BBaller1337, I'll look into everything you mentioned.

mudmask, we were able to replicate the issue. The issue was from projects created with the previous version of the plugin. The simple fix is to save your project (to a new filename just to make sure), and then close it, and reload it. After saving and reloading, it should work fine.