For my proposed method it is more about swapping out the spriteset based on what happens in the game. The onion skinning if I a not mistaken is about looking at the animation of an object and seeing multiple keyframes at once so you can see the overall steps of the animation superimposed on one canvas and then tweak them as necessary. I apologize if I am misunderstanding the use of onion skinning in this particular instance.

Hello Zero6, does that lead to a visible jump or stutter in the background scrolling when you set it that way?

Thanks for the informative reply! I think where I am off here is that I was assuming that the Spriter object would use more memory than a spritesheet due to everything it does and brings with it including the generated sprite sheet, etc... My assumption was that a sprite sheet would be less resource intensive than an entire spriter object.

I will definitely go over the tutorials with Spriter, etc... I guess my question now is, if I want to use spriter to make my main character and all my enemies, will having that many spriter objects give me much savings over using sprite sheets and instances for them? I am assuming I can use C2 to tell the spriter object to change to different animations the same as I would with my existing sprites in C2 that use sprite sheets?

Thanks again for all the info, all of my experience with keyframing is from Flash, so I understand the tweening process, etc... but C2 and Spriter are still very new to me, so are sprite sheets.

First I would go through the tutorials about paralax, etc... you can set a tiled background and give it movement as well... that should get you on the right path...

I was thinking of a way of doing this that would allow a bit easier coding. But would also mean the characters outfits/armor or whatever they are would have to be as a full set. If you don't need them to be able to switch individual pieces like head, feet, hands, etc... you could do this:

Create multiple looks for your character, in my case I want the character in various suits of armor. Each suite get's it's own sprite sheet, or own row on the sprite sheet. I could then create a variable that represents which row or sprite sheet I want. If I name them all something similar like mainCharacter_GreenArmor then in my variable I use it to control the last part, so if I need them in the Blue Armor, I set the variable to _BlueArmor. Then I have it update the current animation or sprite sheet being used by adding _BlueArmor to it like mainCharacter_BlueArmor. THis way I can swap out easily in game simply by using my variable appended to the character name. Not sure how I would do this in Construct, but outside of construct in code it wouldn't be too hard.

For Example, if I have spritesheets used for the following:

mainCharacter_BlueArmor

mainCharacter_GreenArmor

mainCharacter_BlackArmor

mainCharacter_DefaultArmor

When I find those items in the game and want to switch my mainCharacter to wear them, I just update the sprite with the appropriate spritesheet name so if I am currently using mainCharacter_DefaultArmor, I then set it to mainCharacter_GreenArmor. And use that to set whatever property of the sprite is used to control what spriteset is being used.

Again, no idea how hard it would be to implement in C2, but in .Net it would be fairly straightforward. No idea if this is helpful or not, but figured I would share my point of view.

So I guess my main goal here is to use spriter to help get the movement and positions right, then have it give me a sprite sheet based on the entire character, not of the individual sprites. My goal is to have an ouptut similar to a sheet like the one for teh main character in the jungle platformer sprite pack. So I put all the pieces of the monster together, use the bones to get the overall structure and movement done, create my keyframes, then export the keyframes of the entire creatures movement (as opposed to sheets for each component of the creature) frames. As long as Spriter can do that for me, then I am all set when I buy it.

I may just be overthinking this...

Other wise I can just screenshot each keyframe, and put those screen shots together into a spritesheet I guess... I don't need all the super crazy features, just the basics of make a series of poses (walking cycle, etc...) and export each pose of the cycle as a frame in my sprite strip.

Thanks for the reply, I don't want to export each frame as a seperate image, I want to export all the keyframes as a SpriteSheet in order to keep the benefits of having all the animation frames in a single sheet.

Once you have it up and running, this might be a great topic for a tutorial.

You need to add another condition to the bomb planting where it checks the variable. If the variable is < 1 you do not allow them to plant the bomb. You can do this two ways:

1. On your plant the bomb event add a second condition that if variable is equal to 1 (Events only happen if all conditions are met)

2. On your plant the bomb event add a condition that variable is not equal to or greater than 0 (again, if the condition is not met, the event does not fire of it's actions)

You can check the platformer tutorial or the basic tutorial (sorry I forget which one has you add multiple conditions to an event) for an example of adding multiple conditions to an event. I believe it is in the platformer tutorial by Ashley where you set the animation for idle or running based on multiple conditions. Also the part about jumping on the snails also has multiple conditions that need to be met in order to tell if you kill the snail or take damage instead. These should give you a good starting point.

Basically what you need to do as part of the bomb action, is to check to make sure the variable = 1 or is greater then 0. If it fails the check, the condition is not met and the action should not happen.

This is a question about Spriter, sorry C-7 not trying to side rail here just looking for more info on the plug-in.

Will Spriter allow me to export my animation frames as a spritesheet? Or is that where the planned integration with TexturePacker comes into play?

I am not too worried at this point about the more advanced features for creating animation paths, etc... but just in taking certain frames and exporting them as a simple sprite sheet based on the animations I have crated in Spriter.

Hello Everyone,

I am pretty new here and have just purchased Construct 2 Personal edition. My background is mainly .Net development focused on ASP.NET, SharePoint and Silverlight with a bit of XNA as well. I left Microsoft about a year ago after working there as a senior engineer for 6 years. Now I work as a Senior SharePoint Operations Engineer at a Law Firm in Mountain View, CA (Silicon Valley). I have always been a gamer with my own dreams of writing games and though I started working on my own games in Flash, XNA and Silverlight in the past I never really buckled down and put anything out. I was also trained by Macromedia (before adobe bought them) as a Flash developer and trained the web developers at AOL on flash back when they did their big rebranding effort back in the early 2000's. So I have been around a bit in the industry and worked with many technologies, I am very excited to start working on HTML5 games as well.

I have decided there is not better time than the present and with the full support of my wife and kids, have started working in earnest during my free time on getting my games out of my head and onto the screen... any screen. My plans are to create games for mobile devices as well as PC's. I have been looking at various tools out there for awhile and decided to go with Construct 2 as I love the interface and user friendliness of it. My only concern currently is performance issues compared to writing native apps, but I guess I will find out how that goes when I get there. Currently I am registered for publishing to the Windows 8 and Windows Phone apps stores and will most likely join the iOS developer ranks as well in order to get my games on as many platforms as possible.

While I am not new to game design, I am new to Construct and HTML5/JavaScript. So you may see me asking questions here and there but I will also do my best to answer any questions I see posted as well. Though I may be new to the Scirra tools, my previous development experience seems to carry over pretty well when figuring out how to do things in Construct 2.

Overall I am very glad and excited to be here and finally working actively towards my goals of publishing my own games. I am also very glad to find this great community of fellow game designers and can't wait to get to know you all and help out where I can. This is a great way to start a new year!

ON a side note, you can also find me online in the following places:

Xbox Live: BluePhaze 24x7

Facebook: sidewinder24x7

I also write for egmnow/digital noob, I can't post links yet as I have just joined the site here and haven't posted my 500th post yet.

I also used to run the SideWinder Gaming Blog at Microsoft and was the Community Manager for Gaming on the Microsoft Hardware blog prior to leaving Microsoft.

Glad to meet you all!

James Waymire (BluePhaze 24x7)

Just an assumption here, but you could most likely add a bit more logic and test not only if the players Y is > than the trees Y, but also if they are overlapping. If the players is above the tree base and they are overlapping, set the player animation to whichever one you want. Similar to how you normally change animations.

The platform tutorial has good examples of changing animations based on events.