Thanks Ashley it's definitely something I'm considering. I've built most of the game already in Construct 2 and it's fairly complex. How easy would it be to copy a large amount of Events from C2 to C3 (I don't believe I've heavily relied on any 3rd party plugins yet)?

Thanks dop2000 I dunno what we'd do without Rex Plugins.

In regards to your Edit: the full Win64 folder is 141 MB including the NW.EXE.

Not sure how I can run a debug since the project is so large any browser I've tried crashes on preview.

These are all seperate cloned sprites with 160 individual animations of one of those bouncing idles everybody does in fighting games. All those animations are duplicates though. Are you saying that Construct's Exporter is smart enough to somehow detect that these images are identical and remove them? Even though they are in different sprite folders?

Thanks BadMario those are essential points (& in no way a hijack, these are all useful things to note in regards to this topic).

So I built a test. I made a copy of the Beat Em Up project I've well underway (which contains a fair few sprites already but only weighs in at around 25MB on disk),then I loaded it with a 18 individual sprites at 200px² each containing a whopping 160 individual animations at 35frames each. That's a ludicrous 100,800 image files. All pre-loaded in the first layout (I've not used the MM-Preloader plugin yet).

So on disk this is a huge 6½GB. Construct takes about 2 minutes to save/autosave the project each time, & on top of that all browsers I've tried just crap themselves & crash when I try to run a preview.

However when I export it, after brute compression, the NW.EXE for windows only weighs in at 94MB. The game loads almost instantly & runs fine. I even put in a test key to spawn different character sprites again & again. I had like 30 of these massive bastards on the screen all playing a looping animation & the game seemed to run with no problems.

I figured my PC was just powerful enough to chew it up & spit it out, so I tried it on my crusty 10 year old iMac. Even though the OSX export was twice the size at 196MB, Steve Jobs old paperweight still loaded the game almost instantly & run it with no problems, even with a butt-load of sprites getting spawned onto the screen.

Finally I tried it on this crappy old tablet I found. I have bricks in my back yard that have more processing power than this thing. I ran the 32bit windows EXE on it & even though it was a little slow it still run ok, if not great.

So the real problem here wouldn't be exporting & distributing the game it would actually just be working on it, as Construct will not preview a project of this size. I guess if I just build it gradually, piece by piece, this isn't going to be a huge problem? Any ideas for improving the creation process are welcome.

Thanks dop2000 that's exactly the kind of stuff I'm looking for. That Pre-Loader was what I was thinking about, just couldn't for the life of me remember what it was.

I looked into Q3D a couple of years back newt, when I first thought about using 3D models rendered as 2D sprites. I thought it would cut out the middleman so to speak but I just found it impossible to use and very hard to find good tutorials or documentation for. I'm not sure it's a good fit for a Beat Em Up style game but if anyone knows any good guides for Q3D I would be willing to look at it again.

Thank you AllanR I have used spriter in the past and it is fantastic software. It's definitly something I will use if I do end up going the pixel art route as I have the Spriter plugin for Construct 2.

I am looking for solutions on how to use my 3D models rendered into 2D sprites because I can use Mo-cap to animate them which is a huge time saver for me and also I have put a lot of work into making these models.

I am particularly looking for solutions, hints and tips, on how to get extremely large amounts of image files into Construct without having serious performance hits. I know it's a big ask but it's something I really want to do.

So sorry if I appear dense newt I'm not sure if I follow you? This is a commercial project with plans for digital distribution for PC. Not sure how else I'd distribute a project of this scale?

Thank you newt. Not entirely sure I follow. How would multiple exports work? Also not sure how I'd figure out how much ram I'd target (is as little as humanly possible an option?). If I do a rough sum of how much all the animation sequences would add up to together it's something crazy like 10GB (they're about 800kb each but that's before compression).

Apologies, I'm not the most technically minded C2 user, I'm primarily a graphics/animation guy.

Ah yeah. I seem to remember you and mekonbekon had some great examples of something along those lines here... https://www.scirra.com/forum/spawn-particles-on-the-point-2-object-collide_t82382?start=30

I reckon that's a good way to go, but maybe a bit outside my skillset (I only have so much hair left to pull out). I think I may have a less sophisticated solution.

I can go through every event that progresses the animation, and then set the size of the base object so it changes depending on the angle. Like dis...

Its not elegant or quick but it should do the business.