Thanks, newt. I had no idea about the GIMP animation previewer.

I already have a GIMP plug-in for batching, though.

But the issue that remains is, in Construct you're able to set the animation speeds separately for each frame and each character, and set it to buttons so you see the movement progressions... it gives us a 100% accurate test since it's in the game. You can't do that in GIMP, so even if you preview each frame in GIMP, it won't be 100% the same in Construct when/if you make mods to the animation frames in Construct.

***I'm suggesting this unaware of any way to do it in Construct, so please forgive me if this is already possible in the software***

Doing this one-by-one can be very time consuming. For example, I have 150 images that I'm cleaning up the backgrounds of in Construct. Once I'm done I'll have to export all 150 images one-at-a-time into GIMP where I can batch resize/batch crop the images... then I'll have to import them back into Construct.

Now you may ask, why not just do all of that in GIMP? Well, the reason I do it Construct is because it allows me to play the animation and determine which frames I need (or don't need), and allows me to eye-test them in motion which I don't believe can be done in GIMP. Basically, it's always easier to do these things all in one program.

We're already able to batch import images for animations in Construct... so, might batch image editing (batch resizing/batch cropping) and batch image exporting be made an available feature in future versions of Construct?

Wow, that kicks ass, MisfitBYTE! I'm going to use this and see if I can incorporate it into my project.

Thanks a bundle!

^Yeah, that's what I'm trying to do. I remembered some games back a console generation or so that let me play my own soundtracks in games and set when they played. I used to really love it with the racing games. I wish more game allowed event-based custom trax.

I'm very interested in what you have MisfitBYTE. I agree with Ray, something like this would be wiki worthy for sure.

I've seen some Construct game challenges that challenged users to do this, but what about this as a tutorial tool?:

Are there any plans to create a tutorial in written or .cap form that takes a new user through every object, event, behavior, action, condition (and example expressions) Construct has with example code for each, also explaining when and why to use each? I just notice that a number of things have no documentation or example code, but someone figured it out and posted how they did it. The problem is, in order for a new user to search and find it they'd have to either get lucky or know the specific search terms to find it... or sift through hundreds or thousands of search pages to find it... or ask for help which may not yield a result.

Can the following things be done, and if so could you give me some code examples?

1. Custom Soundtracks: The user fires up my game, and then clicks some type of option in the game that allows him to open his hard drive and then select a music track. The user can then take the track and assign it to any number of situations in the game. For example:

-Finds special item in the game --- user's chosen music plays

-User wins at something --- user's chosen music plays

-User clears a board --- user's chosen music plays

-User dies --- user's chosen music plays

2. Choosing a group of things to use --- say there were a number of different gangs in the game all wearing different colors. At the beginning of the game, you'd have to choose which gang you wanted to be versus which gang you wanted to fight. So you want to pick the Green gang, and then choose to fight the Orange gang.

What would you have to do in order to set up a selection in events where you could choose which gang you want to be versus the game you want to fight?

I get the same error (and another type error) when I attempt to open some downloaded .caps. My guess would be that those .caps were created in older versions of Construct and won't work with newer versions?

if that's the case, it might be a good idea for people to mention what version of Construct they built their .cap in.

^^^ Thanks for the info. I'm going to try that and report back soon.

*crickets*

in-e-bah-dee?

I'm making a game with a pseudo-3D perspective. Here is an example of the board:

<img src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4010/4578407533_5122e7cd02_b.jpg">

The shadows would work like this:

<img src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4010/4579037456_484d6aab37_o.jpg">

The black object represents the shadow.

@newt - yes. I used the example you gave and it works fine, but I'm trying to get a shadow that flattens itself to match the pseudo-3D gameboard. I'm not sure if it's even possible, but perhaps I could attach my own drawn shadow using the same example you gave? I haven't tried that yet. If you know of other ways as well I'd love to hear about those, too.

@manontherun - In reference to increasing image size, I meant this: my characters are a specific size (small) and there is no room on the current images to draw a ground shadow. So, I could take the images into GIMP and then put them on a larger canvas, then draw the shadow on that canvas (because I'll have more space on the image to do it since I've put the image on a larger canvas).

I have a question for you: if I were to break each direction down by angle, would I be able to just attach a drawn image (shadow) to the main drawn image (character) in events? So, when the character moves to, say, 45 degrees the ground shadow does the same, etc.? My only concern however, is that the shadow may not move smoothly in each direction... I mean, it may look like a lot of frames are being skipped.

I want to make shadows for each character, and I was wondering if it's possible to program it where a shadow pic could just be attached to the character. Here is an explanation:

'A' represents the character

'B' represents the shadow

I want to program it where 'B' attaches itself to 'A', and makes 'B' move with each direction 'A' has.

Now, I know I could just increase the size of the character image and then draw a shadow for each frame, but the problem there is that I would have to increase the size of my characters, and it would increase the memory size which I don't want to do because I have so many characters, plus it would degrade quality since my characters are drawn in a smaller size.

Any help is much welcomed!