Image/Animation editor as a significant part of the pipeline

as the title of this thread suggests, the image/animation editor is crucial in the development of games and applications made with construct. i know many comments have already been made about the image/animation editor but another reminder shouldn't hurt. <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_razz.gif" alt=":P" title="Razz" />

i'm currently working on a game and the image/animation editor is really slowing the process down. the gigantic cross cursor obstructs the view of tiny pixels, copying and pasting from other editors doesn't transfer transparencies over, and even copying and pasting within construct itself causes pasted images to have the awkward black backgrounds. :S

It would be cool if we could specify an editor we'd want to use in the settings, and Scirra passed on the arguments of the active object/sprite you'd want to edit to that application and waited for the process to terminate. Ideally then, you could use whatever editor you wanted -- MS Paint, Graphics Gale, whatever. I've been working on a sprite editor myself on and off for the past several years, so obviously I've thought a lot about what sort of programming can be done to make the sprite creator's life easier xD

That's a pretty good idea, I am fully aware of the shortcomings of the picture editor/animator bar, and there are some more improvements coming in 0.87...

Specifying your own app would be cool I guess but it'd have to be something lightweight, I guess you dont want to sit around waiting for PSP to load up every time you edit your sprite. Also, it wouldn't allow for editing whole animations at a time, like the picture editor filmstrip does.

All in all, if we fix copy/pasting so it's painless, why not just keep the graphics tool of your choice and just paste in stuff from that?

yeah, fixing copy/pasting would most certainly help move things along and doing something about the obstructive cursor would help too! =P

I totally agree that load time would make a custom app like that painful -- and in order to support animations, the app would have to have some sort of extension / built-in support for data exchange. I'm cool with that, if that's an option on the table, and if it's not, then I have another suggestion that might be even easier to implement:

Have import/export formats which allow us to put out entire animations / directions / spritesheets / whatever from a single file or set of files. MMF has this, and it's had it since CNC but the support has been awful and the importers have all sorts of problems with crap like transparency, bounding boxes and the like. Again, when I was working on my own sprite editor, one of the key features for using it over the built-in editor was to be able to export to the clipboard (for single frames) which replaced (0,0,0) with (8,0,0) and transparent with black cause that's what MMF wanted, and animations as bounding-box strips for it's "multiple frames" importer. This was extremely useful for the few people that knew how to utilize it, despite the bugs, and I think it would be very easy to implement a similar feature which would be unobtrusive and an excellent alternative to copying/pasting everything in an AO by hand.

I doubt the feature was used much because they never fixed any of the bugs with it, and it was hella annoying. However, this sort of import is perfect for making everything in a different editor, because then all the programmer has to do is write an export filter for it (in the case of existing software) or build in an exporter into their own program which will take an image/animation format Scirra likes.

Actually I agree with you, I think import and export are underrated. Often it gets relegated to being a minor optional add on type thing but comprehensive import and export controls are a pretty major feature. I'll try and have something sorted for 1.0.

Copy/Paste of alpha channels should be added if it aint already <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile" />

Also, how about a little feature to sense what's on the clipboard and seek an appropriate object to import it?

So if I select some HTML text in IE, and paste it into the Layout Editor, Construct will think "Oo! HTML text!" and place an HTML Control floating at the mouse position, containing the HTML text we pasted. You then click and the object gets placed there.

Similarly if the clipboard data is an image, Construct could insert a sprite containing that image.

ASCII text would paste as a string object, RTF text would paste as an RTF object.

Also, in the event sheet editor, t'would be lovely if we could drag a 'Set variable' action into the conditions space, thereby creating a 'Variable is equal to...' condition. Just to speed stuff up really.

Dines: In windows, clipboard data have a header format, but they do not always follow a convention that would cleanly import into Construct -- for example, multiple copies of clipboard data with different headers are exported when copying something from an Adobe product. Also, it isn't always nice to second-guess the user, but in some cases with otherwise un-useable clipboard data, doing some of those things would be nice :3