Construct 2 Release r175

New this build: image and animation reimporting additions, a new on-by-default preload sounds mode, and other usability improvements!

Image and animation reimporting

First of all there's a new "Replace entire existing animation" when importing a sprite strip. It also preserves the existing origins, image points and collision polys if you import the same number of frames. This should make it easier to quickly re-import animations from sprite strip sources.

Secondly by popular demand importing a new image to the image editor only guesses the collision polygon if it's set to the default bounding box. This allows an adjusted collision poly to remain intact after importing an updated image, whilst still automatically giving a reasonable collision poly on first import.

Thirdly and perhaps most usefully, the editor now tracks an "original source path" for every image that gets imported. For example if you have a completely different folder on your computer where you import all your art assets from, then Construct 2 will remember paths from that folder when importing images or animations from there. Then you can quickly reload a single image, an entire animation, or all animations in an object from the original paths. This means you can instantly re-import the images and animations if your artist updates the contents of the original folder.

You can view or explicitly set the original source, and reload the current image from the original source, using two new image editor toolbar buttons: (the left button is a temporary scrawl, our artist will come up with something better shortly!)

The left button opens a file chooser dialog with the remembered original path already selected, so you can see the original path. If Construct 2 does not know the original path, you can also explicitly choose it this way. The right button will reload the current image from that path, just like pressing the "open" icon and choosing the file at that path again, whilst preserving the origin, image points and collision polygon.

The animation frames pane now also has two extra options to reload the entire current animation from its original path, or reload all animations in the object from the original paths. Note that these will undo any alterations you've made from Construct 2 - it will overwrite everything with the image files at the original paths. However for certain workflows this should not be a problem and is in fact an easier way to bring in new changes made by your artist. Just remember if you move the original paths, or transfer your project to a different computer, none of the original paths will be found any more and Construct 2 won't be able to reload anything. Also remember any image modifications - including cropping - will be reverted if you reimport the original sources again.

The new 'Preload sounds' project property

This allows all sound effects to be downloaded and decoded before the game starts. It defaults to 'Yes' which is different to the old behavior. It used to effectively be 'No' - the game would only download images while loading, and download and decode all audio on-demand upon the first play. This can add delay on the first time sounds are played, especially on mobile. Now, when enabled, all sounds (but not music) will be downloaded and decoded while loading. The loader progress also covers this, so by the time it reaches 100% all images have been downloaded and all sounds have been downloaded and decoded. With Web Audio API support, this means as soon as the game starts any sound effect can be played with zero latency. This should make it unnecessary to use the 'Preload' or 'Preloads complete' features of the Audio object: using this mode does it all automatically.

Note 'Preload sounds' does not preload music. Music tracks tend to be large in filesize, and downloading them all in advance could considerably add to the waiting time before the game starts, and with little benefit - it is not usually important if music starts playing after a brief delay while it starts streaming it. If it is, you can still preload it with the 'Preload' action as before, but we recommend preloading only one music track at a time (presumably, whichever you are going to play next).