[quote:283tr7da]How do I prevent it from starting over and over again each tick?

If Autoplay doesn't work try

+ System: Trigger once
+ MouseKeyboard: Key Space is down
-> XAudio2: Autoplay file AppPath & "example.wav" (No loop)[/code:283tr7da]

You can play any sound easily with the Autoplay trigger with XAudio2 but if you want more extensive control you can set your sounds to different channels. It might be a bit of an overkill to set every sound to a different channel as I'm sure they are mixed together when played instead of muting each other while overlapping.

I prefer setting a channel for a whole category of sounds such as Player, Enemies, Environment and the like.

[quote:283tr7da]Can I start the sound where it left off?

You can pause and unpause sounds.
[quote:283tr7da]Can I force it to loop if it ends?

You can quit a loop on a channel.

AltGr + Print screen grabs the current window. Cropping the game area shouldn't be too much of a hassle after that. I don't know whether there's a screen grabbing plugin as I've never needed one myself.

Hi. Experience with MMF generally translates to Construct at some level, once you'll get a grip you'll quickly notice how powerful Construct is compared to MMF. It's generally advisable to start with the Ghost Shooter and other tutorials, they'll show the basic workings on the software.

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/c ... =Tutorials

The wiki indeed is a bit outdated and there isn't very extensive documentation either but looking at other people's caps can be a good starting point. Also to get an idea of the theory of development on Construct the wiki has numerous pages describing good practices.

I typoed something in Google in 2004 and it read "Zotged" right there. It took a few years to adapt it as a nick. Pretty much anyone can say it out loud no matter where they're from so it's nice in online games too.

What I tried to google back then will likely remain a mystery till the end of time.

<img src="http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/9753/11740226.png">

Last night I quickly drafted some ideas on IRC for you but you already left before I was done uploading. You might want to try a much more aggressive shading and use of tones. Also to shape things out: your trees have a kind of dark pillow shading around them but do note that when light is coming from the top you'll have to give the trees much more depth by making almost half of it, the underside, much darker than than highlights.

The same goes for the ground pretty much, you can easily use more of the darkest tile color to fill the undersides of the stones. The grass seems to have rather nice variety now, you could add more of the darkest color and make it feel like it's "flowing" on the rocks so it could look more separated from the rocky ground.

Anyway, it's getting there nicely!

Concerning gameplay you're out of the conversation's bounds. We're not talking about gameplay. Trust me here, I know my gameplay design but this conversation has nothing to do with it. Adding tweens does NOT make the animations longer in time, it just makes them look smoother.

Please let's get back to the topic.

We're getting a bit offtopic here but hey, at least we're talking about animation frames.

Definitely automated tweening has its disadvantages, I'm more than aware of that. Point being I haven't had any real tests yet. If I have a one second animation consisting of 15 keys I don't think it would look that bad if there was another 15 tweens making it look smooth even though half of the frames wouldn't have the same kind of quality. I'm not talking about taking that kind of animating shortcuts as I tend to have a lot of handdrawn keys.

Taking this project's overall looks into consideration it could look very cool to have morphed tweens there too since there is no way I'm animating 60 frames per second by hand. I'm okay between 12-18 keys per second. Professional handdrawn animation in cartoons and anime generally tends to have 12 animation frames per second (which is naturally every other frame of a broadcast fps video file), maybe the full 24 frames in fast scenes.

<img src="http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/8183/tracedkeys1.png">

Here's an example of the said keys. It's a simple fast animation but the problem lies in making it look smooth in a very detailed environment that has a lot of prerendered materials. If it's played fast enough to make it look smooth it's simply too fast and doesn't look natural. If it's played too slowly it stands out. Morphed keys could easily fix this by providing more sense of motion in the animation between the keys.

I put an overlapped "onion skin" version of the animation and I don't think that it would be reasonable to have full drawn production quality animation frames more than that on a character sprite.

Edit: Killed a typo

Edit 2: Oh and as a reply to madster's hint on trying Premiere... We don't exactly boast a budget that would allow us to buy a 1000� piece of software for animation tweens. Thanks for the heads up though :D

Call this the Christmas present to the community.

<img src="http://planar-studios.com/img/24720.PNG">

Edit: Do note that it's 720p, the forum clips most of it

I don't really recommend Construct for pixel art styled games for its high resource demands and I find the runtime a bit of an overkill for low resolution graphics.

Then again I recommend learning pixel art more than anything for game graphics artists. There are many active communities of pixel artists filled with tutorials.

A few sites you might want to take a look at:

http://www.pixeljoint.com/

http://www.wayofthepixel.net/

Also:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=c ... +tutorials

Edit: Fixed a minor typo. A few more sites:

http://www.tigsource.com/ - the home of many indie game developers

http://www.natomic.com/hosted/marks/mpat/index.html - I remember using this tutorial years ago myself. Has a very down to earth look at the fundamentals of pixel art.

Sadly many great sites and tutorials seem to have died. archive.org could be of use.

Edit 2: Found another one I've used in the past. http://www.petesqbsite.com/sections/tut ... s/tsugumo/

This'll be a little offtopic but I think it'll be fruitful for some devs here.

with cheap digital (photographic) cameras that get decent 30fps video at 640x480, I've been thinking of filming my own references.

Jordan Mechner did, back in the day, and look where that got him!

We've been doing that on our current project that has a top-down viewpoint. It makes some interesting results. We found a nice spot for a direct view to a point a few meters below and basically just traced the selected keyframes from the recorded videos. I'm more a traditional sprite artist and not much of an animator so it provided a very good template for animations.

The real problems come into the picture when you're supposed to get a decent amount of tweens. Tracing sprites is alright but drawing quality keys on top of the traces is more time demanding than most could tolerate. A nice idea would be to trace the animation keys and make the animations with bones but I don't like this at all since it doesn't provide the awesome organic natural look that the previous method does.

I've been looking for a nice piece of software to try out creating tweens with by morphing a key frame to another but I haven't found anything worthy. Photoshop's liquify (aka the thing that makes your favorite fashion model's body look ten years younger) seems rather nice but I don't think the feature is included in any of the versions of Photoshop I have a license to.

Okay to the actual OP question then. No decent references here, but you might want to try out the method I described in this post.

You may use this test cap of ours as a reference for bone animating. My animations are rather groovy, basically looks like dancing of some sort (fits the project style), but I'd think it might be good reference for the kind of gameplay demonstrated in the cap.

Arrow keys - move

Shift - jump

CTRL (hold) - run

http://planar-studios.com/files/example/boneanim1.zip

Right, very informative. That's all there is I need to know, basically the start times with our current project ARE getting irritating in our test builds. The texture handling is more than useful to know in future development.

Construct is the most powerful tool for fast development I've ever worked with. I'm not much of a coder myself but I find the Construct's inner works very intuitive. Will look forward and support further development as much as I can.