what is a sub-animation and how does one use them?

err...what is a sub-animation and how does one use them?

I tried looking on the wiki and couldnt find anything about them.

thanks

we all would like to know this ive never seen this used ever

Originally it was intended to allow organisations of complex animations, such as:

Stopped

Stopped (with pistol)

Stopped (with machine gun)

Walking

Walking (with pistol)

Walking (with machine gun)

In this case each weapon-state would be a subanimation to Stopped, Walking etc...

I guess it's too complicated/not useful enough though, since nobody seems to use them. I guess we'll remove it in Construct 2.

i think it would have been used if there were examples of it. for games with a lot of animations i can see what you described being hella useful as of now most users are probably not doing enough animations and just testing stop to require it. im not so sure about removing it in that case.

Moat people tend to make the gun separate from the player (refrencing Ash's example of it's potential use), which is probably why it doesn't get used much...

However!

I didn't even know it was there let alone what it did. I can see uses for this already... I vote leave it in for Construct 2 personally!

~Sol

How does one use this? I didn't know it existed either.

I'm still personally in favour of getting rid of subanimations. People do generally seem to use separate objects to solve this kind of problem. The coding behind it would be a lot simpler, too, and therefore more robust (fewer bugs and no headaches about which tree level of animation you're on)

I also vote for dropping it. theres better solutions.

removing sub animations would be taking a step backwards which would be unfortunate. if one would think about it for a sec using a separate object is not always the best way to go. in fact, it would be cumbersome in some situations adding extra events and conditions to check for zorder, collisions and various other things that should be done in the animations. if you think about stylized games where the object is morphing in the animations the separate object isnt what they do.

currently you can set up your entire game engine based on what you see your character currently doing through animations reacting to what is seen on the screen which would make sense. sub animations take up less space in the animation bar and creates easy state machine that no one knew about because no examples were given.

-edit-

some examples here

including simplest state machine thingy without arrays or variables

can also be used in a way to separate two characters (or character modes/forms) in one sprite.

download last then 2nd then 1st:

last (basic) just shows simple sub animation.

2nd has comments and new animations allows decision for going in two different directions with animations control everything in practically one event.

1st is 2nd example with its comments removed and 2 more animations down another sub level (= 3 levels of sub-animations).

keep in mind in the 2nd example instead of going only left-right you could add as many states as you want to loop thru as long as animations are still in parent but anything that jumps out of parent allows new sub actions under the other parent and are totally separate. this is all done without variables.

The question is - does ANYONE use those subanimations?

The question is - does ANYONE use those subanimations?

Im still waiting on HOW to use them.