New User/Evaluator of Fusion 2.5 Free

Thanks, people of Clickteam Fusion, for the free product. I have been trying it out and will possibly get one of the other versions, unless I go for another engine.

My question to you now is the following one: is there any estimate of when CT Fusion 3 will come out?

All the information I found on it does not even mention any estimate. But certainly you can give such an estimate? I know of upgrade paths, but I would probably prefer to buy version 3.0 in one swift blow, instead of having to upgrade 2.5 Std or Developer, if it comes to it.

I have another question: I sent a small test project to someone, so that he could check it out. For some reason his browser did not load the game, and "cannot load application" or some such notification was shown. I thought some browser setting was the problem, but is there any other reason why it might be so? A kind of security measure might be in place, I suppose.

By the way, I wanted to comment on the registration process for this forum, if you don't mind. Only by the fifth time was I registered, after sifted through the pictures for very long times, reentering information as well, wondering what exactly counts as valid images to be clicked, only to find myself not having ticked a box somewhere on the page, by which the whole process (setting a password, traversing the images to check whether you're a machine, and so on) had to be done again. What torture! May I advise you to make the process quicker, with less images to be clicked, and maybe show which things are at least required to continue? I think there was even a timer on the verifier, so even if you entered all information, it could be that the timer gets to you!

Well, I hope my time with your product will lead me to buy a full version. A friend of mine, working in the games industry, recommended it. So far, so good.

All the best.

I have an important question: how stable is CT Fusion?

Hi there,

in no particular order... Fusion is very stable. The product has been in development for over a decade and has received a lot of bug fixes and stability improvements during that time. Nothing is crash-proof, but it's not at all common. The HTML5 issue your friend had was most likely due to HTML5 security policy. You cannot run this sort of code from a file on your PC, it has to be served from a web server in some fashion. When you run from Fusion, it provides a basic web server inside of Fusion to allow your code to run in the browser. You could get a free space like https://www.freehosting.com/free-hosting.html to place your files to share.

We can't give a date on Fusion 3 yet I'm afraid. My advice is not to hold off because of it as it will be a while yet and Fusion 2.5 remains a very solid and powerful engine - you only have to look at the growing list of games made with it: http://indiegames.clickteam.com/

The forum system will shortly be replaced and so the registration process will be a lot more modern and smoother. With reference to the Captcha images however, those are determined by Google based on their assessment of your IP address' past traffic, type of connection and more. We have it set to let Google determine the best level of security at the moment.

Thanks for trying Fusion! :)

Hi Simon,

I did choose the build option for HTML and put it into a separate folder. I myself and someone else were able to just run it by opening the index.html file. It was the third person who could not. Yeah, I suppose it is a matter of some security setting.

About the release date of Fusion 3.0: but you can give a rough estimate, right? That's all I'm asking in this particular case, heh heh heh. Sometime this year? Sometime next year? It's just that, even if I go for 2.5 Std or Developer, I may want or need the new Fusion 3.0 features if that product is very much superior. In fact, I think that knowing its estimated arrival time and what it will be like, would even prevent me from spending money on certain other pieces of software. I suppose that, if MFA import for Fusion 3.x will be without loss and if reasonable upgrade paths will be the case, I may as well when the time is right get 2.5 Std or Developer. I heard that there will be reasonable upgrade paths. So that leaves this: will MFA import be without loss in Fusion 3.x? (There is at least one webpage I saw which did not seem to give a definite answer.)

(In any case, 2.5 has a nice old Windows look and feel to it.)

Well, so far I like what I have seen and experienced from Fusion. It is very powerful and reasonably intuitive. Only problem I had is that, upon building or running a project, an internet connection was suddenly being demanded. Why is this?

There is another question I had to ask. It is probably a stupid thing or perhaps I have just been looking at the screen too much being tired.

I imported an animation as a series of images. When I set some condition in the Event Editor and set the animation of some object to run, it does not run properly. It rather looks very jerky and hardly moves except once every few seconds, and then it does not even move all the way. How must it be solved? If importing animations like this does not work, then I would sadly have to seek out another engine. But surely there is probably some minor stupid issue going on.

To stop the jerking make sure your hot spot is the exact same on all the frames of the animation. Perhaps you can share your mfa so we can trouble shoot why the movement stops.

Marv

Hi again, I'm sorry we really cannot give any more of an answer other than "not soon" for F3 at this time. F3 will import mfa files - we don't guarantee 100% compatibly as certain functions/extensions may not be available or a few other scenarios, however we do expect most things to import successfully. Where something cannot be imported, F3 will in theory create a dummy to show what should have been there and also a full report of all issues and line numbers.

@Simon:
Thanks for all the effort and answers, Simon. I appreciate that. I understand that you will not release the estimated release information I seek. That's okay. No worries. I understand why. (And maybe I would have done the same thing.)

The only question left for now is why Fusion tries to connect to the internet upon running or building a project.

@Marv:
Thanks for your effort. I appreciate this.

I had already thought about the pivot points or hot spots. I am probably a tired man, so I don't see the simple answer for the issue. Maybe you are able to help me better if I explain in more detail.

I made a ball image. I used Spriter to make one animation where it rolls and bounces up and down. In Spriter I set the total time, the key frames, the Y position, the whole thing. The ball rotates, and also changes in Y position to simulate bouncing (and maybe a little X position change). This all seems to work well.

I export the animation as a series of PNGs.

I import these PNGs in Fusion. It all looks well, except that it does not bounce. If the pivot points are all set in the same locations, it is smooth and it does not bounce.

Could you be more specific about connecting to the Internet? When exactly have you seen this behaviour and how are you detecting this? (I'm not aware of any such connection, so I need more information to investigate further)

I can't really be very specific about it. It's just that at least the first time, when I built and ran a test project, my firewall suddenly notified me that Fusion (build R290.4) was trying to connect to the internet. If I recall correctly, it was an inbound connection attempt (it could have been an outbound attempt). I found it strange, because it does not seem to me as though it's the kind of software that should make any such connection upon building or running a project.

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As for the other issue, if anyone is interesed: the pivot point is set at import at the centre. I thought about maybe unticking the crop option. I did this, and the vertical movement does not take place. It seems suppressed.

Ah right. As I explained earlier, in order to run HTML5 projects, browsers require that you run from a server (local files are almost always blocked). For this Fusion sets up its own internal web server and then serves the web page with your files in it. I don't know whether it checks for the latest files for this process when doing so, but the connection you saw is related to this and nothing untoward.

The issue with your jumpy animation relates to the hotspot (what you termed the pivot point). Unless the hotspot is set to relatively the same perceptual spot on your image, it will appear this way. If you crop all images and this results in different shapes, simply centering the hotspot (which is the offset the image is drawn at) did not guarantee that it will be in the correct place.

Wait a minute, I don't get your response. Maybe I am foolish in this.

About the animation matter:
We've established that setting the pivot points to the centre, whether I import them with the cropping option or not, plays back the animation properly (the rotation), EXCEPT that it does NOT move vertically (position). Shapes are correct, from the looks of it.

Perhaps this is better: what if someone else more experienced than I in matters of animation and Fusion simply uses Spriter to animate a simple rotating ball that, during the animation, goes up once and then down (as if bouncing)? Or someone could simply list here in words how he would essentially do it using Spriter and Fusion. (I don't know if anyone is available for this. I would appreciate it very much.) If this person is successful, I would look at those steps, and this would show me what I did wrong in my process.

I really like Fusion, and I was getting very much used to it quickly, which was motivating me to go all the way and just buy it already, as the program was growing more and more on me, but this setback demotivated me. I don't have much inclination to fight with it or seek out workarounds, though perhaps I must, though it may very well be something in the process I did.

The hotspot (it's not called a pivot point) needs to be in the centre of your image, not the image canvas. For example, you could have a 100x100 image with a red 50x50 square in the top left of the canvas. If you set the hotspot to the centre of the frame (50,50) then when the object displaying that image is at 0,0 - you wouldn't see anything other than one red pixel. This is because the hotspot at 50,50 would make Fusion position the bottom right corner of the image (the hotspot) at the screen coordinate 0,0. This would mean that the majority of the red square was offscreen at the top left corner.

In the same canvas, you could set the hotspot to 25,25 and the square would then be centred around the coordinate on the screen (in this case, at 0,0 you would see half of the red square). If you placed the hotspot at 0,0 and displayed the object at 0,0 you would see the whole square.

All of this is with a canvas twice as wide/high as the square image. So you can see that it is important with the hotspot to think about it as the point/offset in an image which Fusion will place the image on the screen at any given coordinate.

As such, the centre point is about perceptual centre in an image, not solely the centre of the canvas (although often these end up being the same thing). Ideally with a bouncing ball you wouldn't do it with animation, rather a movement or some code (we have basic and real-time physics engines for bouncing objects). That said, if you wanted to make a circle move up and down as though bouncing, the hotspot offers an interesting way to achieve this:

Make 4 frames, each 24x24 pixels, containing a the same basic circle image filling the 24x24 canvas, with the hotspot set to centre, bottom (12,24)

On frame 2, set the hotspot to 12, 28 (4 pixels out of the bottom of the frame)
On frame 3, set it to 12,32 (8 pixels out of the bottom)
Set frame 4 to the same as frame 2 (12,28)
Set the animation to loop back to the first frame.

By manipulating the hotspot in eccentric manner, we can make the ball animate in a very basic bounce. The other way would be to have an animation with all frames sized 24x32 and the hotspot set to centre bottom for all. You could then physically move pixels in the frame to achieve the same bounce animation, by moving them up or down in 4 pixel increments.

@SeparateLawyer did my explanation make sense to you?

Hi Simon,

Sorry for the late response. I was quite busy and had no opportunity to respond.

Thanks for your response.

Your response was not totally clear to me at first. It is as though you used words (very) loosely or as though there was some ambiguity or verbosity, but I may be wrong (or too fatigued). I also expected more of a sort of essential rundown without much detail taking the workflow concerning Spriter and Fusion into account.

But I see what you mean. What it comes down to is that you would move the hot spot, which is equal to what one might call its main coordinates and so recognized by Fusion, in all images/frames of the animation so as to move the object's position vertically.

And I also thought about just making the ball and having it rotate in Spriter, after which I would change its Y position somehow in Fusion, pretty much as one would make a character animation and have it move around, so to speak in principle.

I haven't come to it yet due to other matters I attended to. Additionally, this little test project with the ball in question was actually not supposed to be done, but I thought to do it anyway so as to get more feel for Fusion. I would probably leave this project for now and do another test and practice project I originally planned to do.

Thanks for all your efforts, Simon.

"And I also thought about just making the ball and having it rotate in Spriter, after which I would change its Y position somehow in Fusion, pretty much as one would make a character animation and have it move around, so to speak in principle."

Quick example I knocked up in 10 minutes to show you how easy it is to program a bouncing ball, although i didn't animate the rotations in Spriter, this would be very easy to do.

Click the mouse to create a ball . . .

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Graeme2408

"And I also thought about just making the ball and having it rotate in Spriter, after which I would change its Y position somehow in Fusion, pretty much as one would make a character animation and have it move around, so to speak in principle."

Quick example I knocked up in 10 minutes to show you how easy it is to program a bouncing ball, although i didn't animate the rotations in Spriter, this would be very easy to do.

Click the mouse to create a ball . . .

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Thanks, Graeme. I hope to have a look at closely if the opportunity arises.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SeparateLawyer

...It is as though you used words (very) loosely or as though there was some ambiguity or verbosity...

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I was quite specific o_O

Hey Simon. Well, you did ask me and you expected honesty (I hope), and I made some other relevant points in the same post, heh heh. That cut-out citation therefore does not seem fair.

Forget about it.



Now that I am back after much business, and back at evaluating Fusion, and finally back at my original test project (a simple shooting platformer), here is my new question: is it possible to create a side platformer with the free version, or must I simply get a full version? I see that the free version lacks a certain platformer plugin or some such thing to ease the process, but I suppose one may circumvent it, or I am perhaps already forced to commit.



Additionally, I will admit that Fusion, or what I have noticed of it, is very likeable and gave me quick powerful results so far, and I have seen certain greater results from others using it, so I suppose that perhaps I should simply commit, but I have read reports where people did mention a possible disadvantage, namely the possible lack of clarity of a project if it gets or is large. I would think that the DLC, as far as I saw, alleviates this to some extent, but to what extent?

I also read or heard that Fusion has many so-called gotchas. Is this true? (I don't like gotchas.) I think I came across one when I was investigating and thinking about how to use sprite sheets in Fusion. In fact, I think I recall a video where one of the Clickteam employees said that Fusion 3 will be what Fusion already should have been (or something along those lines; I forgot the exact words), where it seemed implied that there would be no gotchas. I also noticed that you cannot really easily and immediately set the time for animation frames as well, but that you must instead copy a frame many times, or am I missing something?

Please, if possible, and I mean well, convince me properly, and if you can with the clarity of a philosopher, why I should commit right now or why I should at least keep getting used to the free version for practice after which I will buy Fusion 3. (I still have some time before I finally start to build my large project. I think I can wait for Fusion 3, if it's not too long.) And convince me why I should not right now go for another well respected engine.

@SeparateLawyer I wasn't taking offence, I was simply confused because I gave a very specific walk through the theory of it all, using exact and correct terms and terminology. When you talked about ambiguity and loose words, I was rather confused as I'd literally gone to the specifics with actual coordinates and everything - far from loose or ambiguous and any verbosity was to make sure I didn't gloss over anything! ;)

Yes Fusion Free is perfectly capable of creating a platformer without the Platform Movement Object. Fusion has built in movements, or you can use your own code to create movement or a combination of both (personally I recommend developing your own because it will then be able to do exactly what you want, rather than making your game fit to how the movement types work.

The so-called "gotchas" as you put it are a misnomer. If you consider Fusion to have them then all programming languages have them. Fusion does things in a certain way, as does every language/development environment. Whilst there are some issues which make certain tasks a little harder than they could be (hence we're creating Fusion 3 to eliminate/improve these areas) it's just a matter of learning how Fusion works and creating your game accordingly, nothing more. Fusion 3 is most certainly not "what Fusion already should have been" otherwise we'd have just made Fusion 2.5 be that (trust me it would be a lot easier than making a brand new product from scratch!) Fusion 2.5 is a very mature product which has enjoyed over a decade of development and enhancements from the original version. With any development you start with a structure and design which you hope will see you through whatever changes you need to make in the future. Fusion has been extremely flexible in a lot of ways however some aspects of the design make certain improvements very difficult to implement - when it becomes more work to make these changes than to create a brand new product which is designed to allow them easily, this is obviously the course you take, this is very normal with software development. Another reason we're making Fusion 3 is that new technologies which simply didn't exist when we first launched Multimedia Fusion now exist which add power, flexibility and the ability to develop much more rapidly. Fusion 2.5 obviously wasn't designed to leverage these technologies so integrating them now is less efficient than creating a new product. The one thing we certainly don't do here is release products simply to make a buck - every new iteration brings significant improvement, features and development.

Fusion 2.5 does not provide a facility for per-frame animation speed settings, no. You can paste multiple copies of frames to achieve this, Fusion knows they are the same graphic and so doesn't store the data twice.

I'm not going to sit here and try to convince you to buy the software if you're saying you want to be convinced - I don't believe in pushing products on people for the sake of a sale. The best thing you can do is to use the Free version and see whether it meets your needs and if you find yourself needing the more that Fusion 2.5 Standard offers, you can take the decision to buy it or not :) We'll be here to answer any questions you have along the way.