Help, I suck at animating!

Nope. Nothing I try works. Heres a zip, it has the cap for the menu I'm trying to make, and an MP3 called gears. I'm sure it is possible to do, I just don't want to waste any more than the 3 hours of my life I've already wasted trying to figure out how to do such a simple task as put a sound in constuct.

You left out the .cap file. Your zip only has the .mp3 and the .persist file.

Edit:

Anyway, .mp3 can only be played by XAudio2 as music, not as a sound. Check out the wiki: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/c ... io2_Object

And here's how it's done:

<img src="http://i45.tinypic.com/11tqsmt.png">

RedText by deadeye (C) 2009

Put your music into a folder called Music or whatever at the same level as your game. This can be either your .cap file or the .exe that you build. It's just, you know... less messy.

When you want to have your XA2 play the music, this is what your music action should look like:

-> XAudio2: Play music AppPath & "\Music\Gears.mp3"

Just to be clear, this is what you type into the expression when you choose the "Play music from file" action:

AppPath & "\Music\Gears.mp3"[/code:2haxne2y]

Edit 2:
If you want to play your Gears.mp3 as a sound, you will have to convert the file to .wav or .wma, etc.  Something that XA2 sound channels will support.

AppPath includes a trailing backslash, eg. C:\Games\MyGameSo that should strictly speaking be: AppPath & "Music\Gears.mp3"

Huh, well it worked in my example with that extra backslash anyway

I think Windows bails you out by ignoring double slashes in a path, but it's best to avoid it if you can.

it's really impossible to share animations, as bone animations can't be saved or loaded.

So just take the .cap I posted at the beginning and animate that... or just do it from scratch. I just need to animate a stickman (well proportioned, with rounded encaps) with bones. I can take it from there

This is a platform so it'll eventually have to jump, tiptoe, fall and die in grisly ways.... but for now, just running. Thanks!

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1010927/puppetrobot.exe

i build ik rigging for most of my heavy animating, especially big things, as you all know.

heres a little example i whipped up using my big robot from unfinished static scrubber.

using only simple beziers for feet movement and sine oscillations for the arms and body, you can do alot if you make a well rigged character, and you dont have to be a great animator. this took me 5 minutes to animate and the result is pretty good.

if i were able to code id make a puppet editor using my techniques for construct, but since i cant ill probably make a nice tutorial for everyone showing a whole bunch of my cool little techniques ive figured out.

(alot of stuff is drag and dropable, play around )

This is realy cool Quazi. I like to look at what you've done. I must not have had rounded endcaps .