Being able to preview/play a single animation would be nice. Right now, layouts load and save slow on my CPU even though my CPU is way beyond the technical requirements. If I could preview just one animation, I could get fly back and forth between testing and working much faster.

Here is another thing; I like the animation listing style you have better than what's in Construct now. And, I wish I could drag and drop an animation that was listed as, say '160', move it to where it says '5', and still have it read '160' unless I edit the number manually... AND, the animation will run in the order they are listed rather than just based on the assigned number. I've found that when you're using a ton of animations per character like I do, you need to move frames around a lot. But by the time you finish and time passes, you're not going to remember that frame '125' got moved to frame '7', and '9' got moved to '13', and so on. If the number never changes unless I change it, I'll always know where I've put each frame.

Mmmm... maybe the image editor? At least in my case I prefer to use the gimp or others to paint or draw... mmm... but then how to make control points and those things?... mmm...

I would almost positively never use Construct again if that happened. The editor is so useful for quickly tweaking and testing frames inside the game environment (which is the best place to test animations). If anything, the editor should be treated with improvements.

You can do that now with image manipulator, and a loop.

I don't understand from that. Are there any .caps of this being done? I wonder because I get the impression from seeing a lot of the games being made with Construct, that they aren't using a whole lot of animation frames per character or synchronizing development between Construct and a different coding environment, so as a result most people using the program aren't needing to export images much, if at all.

I'm not fond of the idea of using events for it. Since we can already export one frame, we should be able to do the same operation in the same place to export more than one. As it is now, I don't see the point of having the ability to export just one frame from the animation editor if you can't export more... you can't do much of anything with just one animation frame. Right now, I don't see why should we be able to export even a single frame if we can't do more than one from the same place.

-Automatic embedding of all sound and music files - once they are put into the project they should embed with no further action from the programmer.

-Batch image exporting - We can already export one image, I need to be able to export an entire batch. This comes in handy for a few reasons, but here is a big one:

Say you're not a language programmer but you're an event-based programmer and you know how to animate, so you've chosen Construct. You want to work with a team but they're all language programmers. They've told you that they need not just the animations, but an idea of the animation speeds as well. So, you need to be able to edit and test your images in the context of a game environment to get it right for them... you need to be able to watch a collision between two characters in the game environment and then make edits to it right there, adjust animation speeds, etc. Doing it in GIMP or Photoshop is not adequate because all it does is run a single naked animation and there is no context, no timing, no collision... as a result, it's not as effective as it would be if you could do all of it in the Construct and then export when you're finished.

Now, once you've tested it all in Construct and nailed down animation speed and made all of your image edits in Construct, you now need to export those perfectly sequenced and edited images so that the team can use it. The problem right now is, all you can do is export images one-by-one from the picture editor. This is a nightmare when you need to export hundreds of edited images.

Batch image export... please <img src="http://www.operationsports.com/forums/images/smilies/graemlins/y220.gif">

If you could export and then sell your creations, I'd be all over it.

I see that you can take photos of things in the game and get them onto your computer. I don't know if creations are royalty-free, but if so you could build some killer layouts in LBP if you wanted, take snaps and then use it in Construct.

So I tried to make a video of the prototype using Fraps, and the prototype crashed and Fraps crashed with it, LOL! Apparently, there is something with the audio causing the crash.

Gotta love it.

Yup, all the file names are exact. I used a chart to match each file name, then checked both 10 times to make sure. Start of layout sounds don't play in any of the three layouts where it's present. A sound connected to a button command doesn't play either. There is also some ambient sound that's supposed to start at Start of layout, but that doesn't play as well. Everything works fine in the .cap but the exe's sounds are mostly dead.

I've been using .62, maybe this has all been fixed since then. I'm not sure I have the patience (and I'm already past the agreed deadline) to go back and figure out what might be causing the bug. The project is a prototype for a publisher and since I planned to make a video anyway, I can use the .cap to make the video since it seems to play everything with no problems and I'll send that along with the game.

I'll of course be using the newer version of Construct for any new projects I do.

Well, I got it all set now. But only some of the sound files play while others do nothing

No clue. Try saving a fresh .cap in the same directory as your game and try to find the correct directory path from there. Also, are you using autoplay?

Nah, no autoplay. Only load file actions and play channel actions.

That's why I tell people to steer clear of the layout object. Too buggy.

It's such a great object idea though, I hope they can get that worked out.

I wonder why it's been working fine all this time in my .caps for this project, but now it suddenly crashes as an .exe? But even more odd, is that it worked perfectly with the first .exe of this project I ran yesterday.

Okay, so here is what I've determined regarding the "You can't have a layout object set to view its own layout!" problem:

*I went ahead and erased all 4 of the layout objects from the layouts. I then packaged the .exe and the game now runs perfectly.

I can't explain why the .exe I ran yesterday played fine. The only difference between the file I ran yesterday and the one today, is that yesterdays was just a raw .exe while today's was an .exe within a zip file. I don't see how it could make a dramatic difference to how it operates, but that's the only contrast that there's been when comparing both days.

As a sidenote, I should mention that apppath & "MyNewGameSounds\LetsRock.wav" only produced silence in my project.

Try "apppath & "MyNewGameSounds\LetsRock.wav""

No luck. I still get: "You can't have a layout object set to view its own layout!"