Of the top of my head.

1) It is developed by a pretty beefy studio, look up YoYo Games.

2) It's older and was well established before being bought by YoYo Games and even before Construct 2 gain notoriety.

3) Some very popular games have been made with it.

and my personal favorite, a perk of being older...

It has the better name!

Seriously, if you know nothing about making games and want some sort of piece of software that will help you achieve that goal, what would you search for?... probably some sort of game making program some might even type for game maker straight away. It is the best name.

redmachine124

Recently we spotted a subtle problem with the Animations Editor, if you click on any of the color swatches with their default value of transparent black, that color will be set to be used to draw.

If you try to pick a different color from the main color picker, C3 preserves the alpha value, but because it is now 0, the new color remains fully transparent. Further more, C3 also preserves the luminance of the old color when you pick a new one, in this case the luminance is 0% because the old color is black. This all means that after the color is set to transparent black it makes it seem as if you can't change colors!

This has been fixed for the next beta release, and shouldn't be too long before it lands in the next stable release.

In the mean time, make sure the alpha value is different to 0. You can set it to 255 for a fully opaque color.

Also make sure to check the position of the luminance slider (right below the main color picker), if it is all the way to the left, the color will always be black, if it is all the way to the right the color will always be white. The middle will give you the same color as the one picked in the color picker.

You can also change the luminance of a color by changing to HSL color space (the very bottom of the color palette). The you can change the luminance value of the color manually, it ranges from 0% to 100%.

Hope that helps.

bilgekaan

I tried setting some events up to loop a timeline, and my first attempt to just replay on the timeline end condition doesn't seem to work as I expected. Looks like it is bug, i'll be looking into it.

NetOne

It looks like you are doing everything ok.

At the moment the Set Keyframes option, will always attempt to create all missing keyframes at any given position, this includes the master keyframe and any property keyframes. If there are already keyframes at the position, they will be updated with what ever is the current value.

If you wan't to ignore some keyframes when playing a timeline, you can disable them. This is similar to deleting them, but if you use Set Keyframes again in the same position, no new keyframes will be added on top of the disabled ones.

You can select multiple keyframes at the same time by pressing Ctrl (Cmd in Mac) as you click on them. It is also possible to make a rectangular selection to select multiple keyframes at the same time by pressing Alt while you hold the pointer down and drag the mouse.

I hope that helps.

Cubic Bezier Curves

As of the latest release, r144, it is possible to edit the path of an instance as it is animated using cubic bezier curves. This is not activated by default though. In order to use this feature you will need to set the new Path Mode property of the timeline. Currently there are two setting for it, Line and Cubic Bezier.

Once the mode is activated a few extra UI elements will appear in the Layout to allow you to edit the path of an instance as a curve. Remember that the new controls will only show up as long as Editing Mode is turned on.

It is also possible to see in the Timeline Bar which path mode is being used in between each pair of keyframes, and change the value if you like. This is similar to how you can change the ease function that is used in between each pair of keyframes.

Keep in mind that this feature is only used for X and Y properties of an instance, so other property tracks will not show a path mode.

luckyrawatlucky

That is a feature I am planning on adding, at some point in the future. The idea is that somehow, possibly through an event action you should be able to change the instance or instances that a timeline is affecting, that way it would be possible to re-use the same animation for multiple instances. Not too sure when will I get around to doing that though.

mekonbekon

When I first implemented the feature, there was no need to press ctrl to scrub. Right before making it public though, I was doing a little example animation, and I was constantly following what at the time was the wrong flow to create keyframes, which was:

1. making changes in the layout or properties bar
2. moving the time marker to a new position
3. setting keyframes in the new position

This meant that any changes I made in order to later create keyframes out of them, were lost because the program would preview the animation from the current time as soon as I moved the time marker to the position I wanted.

As the developer this was just a mild annoyance because I knew exactly what was going on. So I continued working taking into account that the correct workflow was:

1. moving the time marker to a new position
2. making changes in the layout or properties bar
3. setting keyframes in the new position

I thought that for anyone else this small gotcha would be confusing/annoying, so I decided that the default behaviour when moving the time marker shouldn't change instances values in any way.

Having to consciously press a key in order to preview makes it almost impossible to do it on accident, so the mild confusion of loosing changes because of an incorrect scrub becomes almost impossible.

When implementing these I thought about my previous experiences with other software like, 3d Studio Max or even Unity, where you have to juggle a bunch of keyboard shortcuts along with the mouse, just to be able to do something. I like every other person got used to that very quickly, so I thought it would be the same here.

dop2000

Somewhere in my TODO list there is the item "Further Event Sheet Integration", particularly the possibility to set a keyframe that would trigger an action on the related instance, an "Action Keyframe" if you will. But I have no timeframe as to when I would start working on that.

As for C3 crashing, I must have introduced that bug recently because I am pretty sure that should work, I will get around to fixing that for the next beta release.

justifun

Is it theoretically possible for a plug-in developer to write something that could convert motion data from a Json or xml sheet into the timeline format so that construct could play it back? Would it be hard for timeline to have a load Json function?

I suppose it would be technically possible. I haven't tried this myself so I'm sure there are lots of caveats, but a plugin should be able to create a timeline programmatically at runtime, this is pretty much what the Tween Behavior does under the hood.

But I suppose that you are thinking of importing data from other animations tools so C3 can just play it back. At the moment this would be very difficult because the feature is just not mature enough, so it just doesn't understand a lot of features present in other animation software.

Delenne

One more question: will users have access to properties of plugins? For example, will it be possible to control Spriter object parameters with the timeline? Or will it be limited to the standard Construct objects?

In order to be able to animate C3's built-in plugin properties I had to do a little bit of work, because there was no way to update the values asides from event actions. The way it works is that each plugin needs to define which of it's properties are animatable and then implement the appropriate logic to react to changes at runtime. By default a plugin property is not animatable.

All of that means that each plugin creator needs to update their plugin if they want to support animation of properties through a timeline.

The details on how exactly to update a plugin will be released later, when the whole feature is more stable.

So to answer the question, at the moment only the built in plugins support timelines. In the future it will be possible to modify existing plugins to do so aswell.