^^^ In response to the previous two ideas, there seems to always be a way to make something work in this program, it's very versatile. But personally, I would rather something like this be made an option in the image editor rather than using events to get the result. You should be able to highlight all of your frames in the image editor and then select what command you want to apply to those frames, click the command, and then done.

Importing images in a batch in Construct is as simple as clicking 'import frames' and then highlighting all the frames you want, then clicking 'open'. It should be just that simple to batch export, resize, and crop, as well. We're already 50% of the way there since the importing function already allows for batch commands.

Most of my stuff is drawn in another program, but I can see the need for batch processing because of the need for accurate animation testing of your changes. Having to switch back and forth between programs is a bit annoying.

The more you can do all in one program, the better.

Haha, I like the title of this thread

It sounds to me like a question about allowing the end user to put in his own custom soundtracks that trigger when an event happens. The best example I can think of is with a football game called NCAA Football 09 for XBOX 360. The way it worked was, the game gave you a series of events like:

1st down

3rd down

Sacks

Interceptions

Touchdowns

And then the end user would select one of the above events, then it would open their XBOX 360 hard drive where the end user could search for a music track that they wanted to play for the specified event. Lots of people have music on their hard drives (I think just about every PC comes with pre-loaded classical music), and of course there is free music all over the place on the net, so the end user finding material to use wouldn't be a problem at all. Thing is for the program creator, how the heck do you do it in Construct? That I don't know. It's not something I've ever considered doing with the program, I'd bet there is a way it can be done though.

If someone knows, this is one of those things that should be wiki'ed, because custom soundtracks is a great feature.

Construct is a great program. It should be taught in Universities. The fact that it's free and works as well as it does should make it a no-brainer because schools wouldn't have to pay any licensing fees. Also, Construct Is deep enough and allows for so many types of games, that there appears to be few real limits except for the imaginations of the people who create with it.

I've been writing in C# since the beginning and as much as I enjoy it, the bottom line is with the way technologies have advanced there is simply no need for 2D game creation to be so difficult and require so much writing just to get something to move a pixel to the right or left. That's why Construct is so valuable, it cuts through all of that, and it makes prototyping a breeze which can't be said for other programs or writing in C. If Construct had an XNA runtime, I wouldn't even touch the XNA framework again... I'd be building my games in Construct, exclusively.

I've had the OP's issue, except mine was with graphic images.

For example, I had a set of 30 animation frames that were 800kb's each. It took forever to preview. But when I cut the images down to between 130kb's to 200kb's, the preview loaded much quicker. Of course, I realize that smaller images load faster than larger ones.

However, I know it's not my computer that caused the slow load times prior to the cutdown. My CPU is not the best, but at 2 and a half Ghz, and 3 GB's of RAM, it should handle everything in Construct fine. But there are quite a few hiccups with loading and saving even smaller images and layouts. When I've used the same images in Visual Studio/XNA, they loaded quickly at even large memory sizes.

After having done a pretty good test (posted here) and then reading the issues of others, it's quite clear that there is a problem. It's not simply an issue of the way people are programming (an accusation I've seen while searching on this issue).

When I ran the test, I used the exact same commands with both the keyboard object and the 360 controller object, starting with the controller object. The keyboard object responded to all of them correctly, the 360 controller object responded to only a few and even switched operations around to other parts of the controller. I'd tell the left thumb stick to command a jump, and it would make the right thumbstick do it... screwy stuff like that. Certain buttons just didn't operate no matter what I did.

Personally, my 360 controller works fine on every game I have. Never had a single problem. It also works fine for me in XNA (I program in C# sometimes) and MMF, but in Construct it's a no-go.

If you run twice is it just as slow the second time? The second time it should cache the images which are the slowest part, and run a lot quicker.

Yep. In fact, no matter how many times I save or run the same layout even without making changes to it, I get the exact same lag.

Also, when I run debug layout and attempt to to restart the layout in the debug commands, it does the same thing. Pretty much everything lags except opening the program or running a layout with no objects in it.

I'm on a mobile device right now, but will try to post later.

What I can say at the moment though, is that I have one layout with a 30 frame animation that totals about 800 kb's per frame. That one loads the Run layout function slow and saves slow.

I've also had a frame where there was just one picture totaling about 2 MB's, and that one did the same.

I'm getting a lot of lag when saving, and when selecting "Run layout" from the software.

When I save, it takes a long time for the process to finish (like 2 minutes or a little more on average) and the windows message windows always say "not responding" while it's running the process. And when I select to Run a layout it basically does the same thing.

I just got another CPU 2 weeks ago so now I'm running Vista with 1.34 GB's of vram, 3 GB's of memory, AMD Athlon Dual core 2.3 GHz.

Is there anything I can do to get better performance?

Yeah, I may do that. But the thing I'm most curious about is if these are all known issues and others are having the same problem?

I don't see a lot said about the 360 controller object. Could it be because so few people have used it here that it's not made much of an issue? Or is it because lots of people have used it and found the same issues and gave up on it? I don't know, that's what I'm curious about.

If anyone could tell me if they've had the same issues, or some solutions to the issues I've described, please let me know. Right now, it just seems like the object may be broken. It just wouldn't make sense for a command to work properly for two buttons, but the same command for two other buttons does nothing.

P.S. I should mention that I just re-did all of the commands I described using the Keyboard object and they all work perfectly fine. But the 360 controller object still doesn't do them.

Hello,

I've been testing some different things in Construct to try and learn it. RIght now I'm testing the 360 controller object and I've encountered a number of issues. Let me preface by saying that my XBOX 360 controller works perfectly with every Windows game I have, works perfectly with my XBOX 360 machine, and using the Windows controller calibration it shows that all buttons work properly.

In Construct however, I get the following (the issues are in #'s 3 through 8 ):

Test #1: Make the program jump to another layout when pressing "Down" on the dpad, and "A", simulataneously.

Listing method:

Event = Button A is down

New condition = Dpad down is down

Result: Success, it jumps to another layout.

======================================

Test #2: Make the program jump to another layout when pressing "Left" on the dpad, and "B", simulataneously.

Listing method:

Event = Button B is down

New condition = Dpad Left is down

Result: Success, it jumps to another layout.

======================================

Test #3: Make the program jump to another layout when pressing "Right" on the dpad, and "X", simulataneously.

Listing method:

Event = Button X is down

New condition = Dpad Right is down

Result: It does nothing.

======================================

Test #4: Make the program go to another layout when pressing "Up" on the dpad, and "Y", simulataneously.

Listing method:

Event = Button Y is down

New condition = Dpad Up is down

Result: It does nothing.

Note: The Y button and the X button appear to be completely inoperable, while A, B, the shoulders and the triggers work fine.

=======================================

Test #5: Make the character do something via commands on the left analog stick

Listing Method:

Event = Left thumb Up is down

Result: It does nothing. However, when I begin to press the 'X' button wildly it then does the desired operation.

======================================

Test #6: Make the character kick via command on the right analog stick

Listing method:

Event = Right thumb Up is down + Sprite: Set animation to "Kick"

Result: The right stick does not respond. However, when I push "left" on the left stick the animation plays.

======================================

Test #7: Move forward to another layout (like a menu) and move back using the "Start" button.

Listing method:

Event = start is down + Go to layout "Pause Menu"

Result: It goes to the "Pause Menu" layout.

======================================

Test #8: Move back to the game layout from the "Pause Menu" using the 'start' button.

Listing method:

Event = start is down + Go to layout "Game layout"

Result: It does nothing. However, when I use the 'back" button in the event instead of 'start', it works.