Introduction to Timelines

This looks like a major step forward! It's nice to see Construct finally getting a proper timeline function like Godot, Unreal, and Unity. It opens up SO many possibilities!

Couple of questions:

• Are nested timelines possible?
• The animation interpolation control is quite rudimentary. Are you planning to add a graph editor of sorts?
• Will bones/segmented characters be implemented? The competition allows for these, and it opens up many possibilities. Construct still relies on Spriter, which is less than ideal.
• Will motion paths be integrated with the timeline?
• Which parts of Construct's functionality can be keyframed/used in a timeline exactly? Everything, including event sheets and functions, and parameters for any object that is inserted in the layout? How far does the integration go?

Anway, good job so far. One of the primary reasons why I did not consider Construct in the past was the lack of a timeline. I'll be looking forward to see where this goes.

IJCT

scrubbing preview should be a button on the interface, like "enable scrubbing preview" while dragging the timeline, its not obvious that we need to press CTRL (cmd)

This, along with other keyboard shortcuts will be outlined in the manual, when it is written. I think that once you know about it, it's pretty easy to use.

also please add dark theme for the timeline.

This should come in time, otherwise it looks pretty ugly in any theme other than the default one. While we don't have this the whole feature will remain behind the experimental flag.

onion skinning its a needed feature for this.

What exactly are you thinking about? I picture a few different things.

1) A translucent preview of how an instance looks in each keyframe. So you can more or less tell how the animation will take place.

2) Several translucent previews of how the instance looks as it is animated. Something like this maybe?

I have the feeling you are thinking of the second option. While I think it would look nice, I don't think it is absolutely crucial to creating an animation. The scrubbing preview already serves the purpose of giving you a feel of how the animation is turning out.

DiegoM - Here is a video of me showing the workflow i was trying to explain above.

my.pcloud.com/publink/show

Delenne

Are nested timelines possible?

At the moment this is not possible, I was thinking about it just yesterday though. But I don't think I will be able to start working on it any time soon.

The animation interpolation control is quite rudimentary. Are you planning to add a graph editor of sorts?

I am planning to add the option to create custom ease functions. These feature would come with a special editor to build your custom easing curve. You should then be able to assign that custom curve in the same way you assign the built in ones. Is that what you mean?

Will bones/segmented characters be implemented? The competition allows for these, and it opens up many possibilities. Construct still relies on Spriter, which is less than ideal.

At the moment there are no plans to support bone structures. That is a completely different feature which just happens to work very well with the concept of a timeline, so they are often assumed to go hand in hand.

Will motion paths be integrated with the timeline?

I Have thought about this too, but I am not too sure when I will be able to start work on this.

Which parts of Construct's functionality can be keyframed/used in a timeline exactly? Everything, including event sheets and functions, and parameters for any object that is inserted in the layout? How far does the integration go?

At the moment you can create keyframes for almost all properties that can belong to an instance. This includes the common properties, instance variables, behavior properties, effect parameters, and plugin properties.

Some properties don't make sense to be interpolated, so those are not available. Ej. Sprite's Initial Frame can not be interpolated.

There are some properties which are missing, because they are not part of Construct at all. For instance at the moment it is no possible to set the current frame of an animation from a timeline. That is a missing feature I would like to add.

I have though about the possibility to interpolate Layout and Layer properties, Event Sheet global variables and the ability to trigger an event sheet action from a timeline, but those things are just in my TODO list. There is no estimated time of even when will I start with any of that.

Delenne

> Are nested timelines possible?

At the moment this is not possible, I was thinking about it just yesterday though. But I don't think I will be able to start working on it any time soon.

Too bad, but it is encouraging that you have thought about this. Nesting timelines simplifies a lot of animation work.

> The animation interpolation control is quite rudimentary. Are you planning to add a graph editor of sorts?

I am planning to add the option to create custom ease functions. These feature would come with a special editor to build your custom easing curve. You should then be able to assign that custom curve in the same way you assign the built in ones. Is that what you mean?

Sort of. In animation software like Maya and Blender a graph editor allows for full control over the timing and easing of your animation.

For example, here is the one that just got added to Godot 3.1 (beta):

In the top is the keys timeline. Click on the little curve icon, and it opens the graph editor. I am used to 2d and 3d animation graph editors, and it is an essential part to fine-tune your animation. In Toonboom it is handled with an awkward mini dialog.

In Anime Studio it works with an identical graph editor:

> Will bones/segmented characters be implemented? The competition allows for these, and it opens up many possibilities. Construct still relies on Spriter, which is less than ideal.

At the moment there are no plans to support bone structures. That is a completely different feature which just happens to work very well with the concept of a timeline, so they are often assumed to go hand in hand.

Understandable. It is a huge undertaking all by itself. But seeing that you are working on this timeline I see a glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel that might perhaps hint to having bones implemented sometime in the future.

> Will motion paths be integrated with the timeline?

I Have thought about this too, but I am not too sure when I will be able to start work on this.

Again, great to know you have already been thinking about integrating these.

> Which parts of Construct's functionality can be keyframed/used in a timeline exactly? Everything, including event sheets and functions, and parameters for any object that is inserted in the layout? How far does the integration go?

At the moment you can create keyframes for almost all properties that can belong to an instance. This includes the common properties, instance variables, behavior properties, effect parameters, and plugin properties.

Some properties don't make sense to be interpolated, so those are not available. Ej. Sprite's Initial Frame can not be interpolated.

There are some properties which are missing, because they are not part of Construct at all. For instance at the moment it is no possible to set the current frame of an animation from a timeline. That is a missing feature I would like to add.

Yes, that is what I meant. This opens up a huge number of possibilities!

I have though about the possibility to interpolate Layout and Layer properties, Event Sheet global variables and the ability to trigger an event sheet action from a timeline, but those things are just in my TODO list. There is no estimated time of even when will I start with any of that.

Looking forward to future timeline features in Construct.

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?

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.

Niiice!

DiegoM - What's the hotkey for adding keyframes? You mention there is one but not what to press.

Did you think about doing it with BEZIER CURVES?

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.