[Suggestion] Workflow enhancement. Change Journal

Hey ASHLEY. I am really grateful for the inclusion of the linking of asset management. It has helped and it's a big step towards team work flow.

However can you look at one more feature for this. As you already store a source file for images(yay). Could you add a feature more for project directories.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-ca/library/windows/desktop/aa365261(v=vs.85).aspx

Windows(and Linux) offer Directory Change Notifications for their OS. If certain values change an application will be updated of those changes. And offers a change journal that could be taken advantage of.

Offer caproj directories a developer /assets/ folder that C2 watches the Change Journal and Notifications. When changes occur to a file within the Assets folder C2 can use the link information to reload the asset automatically. This feature would super streamline and separate the artists/composers and programmers. While increasing development speed.

Programmers would see art changes when pulling from a repository. Artists will see updates without having to wait for programmers to reload through each image.

I'm sure this would be a feature that would go over well for all team development and even non team development would see this feature as a major benefit.

Are you sure this is a good idea? The manual updating seems like a good sanity check, since if you accidentally overwrote your assets folder with junk, Construct 2 would go ahead and junk up your project without asking.

You can also already just use a folder project and have your artist directly overwrite the files in the project folder.

Maybe a project-wide 'reimport all' button would be a good compromise?

Maybe a project-wide 'reimport all' button would be a good compromise?

Was going to ask about that.

One thing, if you overwrite images in project folder they do not update on layout editor, but they do update in image editor. So you need to double click on sprite and in image editor reload all files manually - or faster way is to close and reopen C2 entirely.

Well it would certainly be a reasonable compromise.

However the reason I ask for the feature is that I've been using it for months now. We had at the peak of development 5 artists, 3 programmers and 2 level integrator with concurrency handled by SourceTree/GitHub combination. The devtools we used between the programmers and level devs. Our project used an Assets folder which contained images, audio, code etc. The devtools used active file change watching to auto update images.

Everything worked smooth in regards to the automated assets updated. Often we would see the PSD files with the assets folder which wasn't necessary, but I understand there was some "junk" as it were. Overall however everything went really well and the folders remained clean.

Of course when you C2 would junk up. I am referring to source assets that are linked. Since C2 is already storing a source file. it seems that just comparing a linked file to be checked when the Change Journal shows an update for that file, would be a very convenient for development. As it was for our team. So just dropping a file into the assets folder should be ignored until the asset is imported into the project at which point an automated link could be done.

Of course artists could just go into animations and work from there, but it's a little less intuitive for the artists. When the team I was working on with The Blue Code we had 6 artists, 1 programmer, 1 audio engineer, 1 level integrator. And the artists just didn't like working in the project/Animations folder. The sorting while fine for programmers just wasn't what the artists much cared for. In the end I had to just keep on manually updating the images every time new one came in.

So from personal experience working with auto asset updates using change journal. The entire workflow went fantastically well. However a reload button and reload on C2 start up(toggleble option) would be satisfactory comprise. I'll take the compromise, but I hope you consider the work flow pro's and con's.

Also C2 is awesome and keep up the good work