Buggy, Buggy Buggy

[fruitnut]

This editor is an absolute nightmare to use! Aside from the numerous irritating bugs that plague the software there is also an insulting number of ‘make it harder for the end user’ omissions that make the whole particle creation process one of the most frustrating experiences of my life. Everything is obfuscated beyond belief!! Timeline FX is a pale copy of Particle Illusion it would seem.

*No Undo!!!! For crying out loud!!!!!!!! In an Editor!!!!! in 2012!!!!

* Cannot set or scale the life of an effect or logically set the number of frames an effect plays for (correctly that is) – The frame step is an ugly and unsatisfactory bodge.

*Click on a node in a graph – click out of the graph just once and you have to trawl right through the whole list of properties (which is an eye wrecker to start with) in order to find and activate it again. Why can’t it just remember???

If you’re lucky enough to figure out how to show the Height and Width properties of a particular emitter’s image ( because the author would prefer you to sweat blood second guessing how the hell to find them) – just one touch of those properties will screw up any number of other propeties such as scale – or totally reset any of the premade library’s emitter properties such as the ‘Lightshow’ Library.

All sorts of other weird behaviours popping up all the time whilst fine tuning an effect, and since it take hours of hair-pulling to get anything to behave anywhere near how you envisage it – it totally negates the entire point of the whole system.

It’s shoddy an unreliable – I advise anybody to look elsewhere. I suspect there are many users who have bought this software only to have it now rotting on their harddisk like I do.

[imported_peterigz]

Hi, obviously I don’t expect my software to be everyone’s cup of tea. 99% of feedback has been positive but I do listen to all the failings and try to address them as you can see from other posts on here 🙂

Thanks for the feedback, I’ll take them on board and look to incorporate as best I can in future releases. Development has been slow the last few months but I am getting back on to things now so watch this space 🙂

I will point out the software is available as a trial with no obligation to buy, so you should be able to try it out and see if it meets your needs first.

[filax]

Hi

Hello fruitnut, i don’t agree with you, ok there is no undo (note to creator : good stuff to add…) but the software is a very good tool. The software play
on the wave of Particle Illusion ! sure, but it offer many features that not have Particle Illusion, seamless anim, looped anim etc…

Time line FX is a very good software, i don’t regret to give my money to the creator. Buy it !

PS : I use this software all the time, it never crashed…

[imported_peterigz]

Thanks filax! Glad you’ve been getting on well with the software 🙂

[duncanperham]

My first post, I think this software is pretty cool, buggy or not. Anyway, I noticed that the frame rate on the explosions could not be changed? I know I can skip frames etc. I have to get my sprites into a 1024×1024 using allegro 5 (maintains support for older graphic cards), (I do my own sprite sorting by code so I usually get a bit more than what the sprite sheet gives). I would have thought that if I set the explosion to 80 frames, it would have stretched out the animation to 80 frames, or shrunk it to say 20. but its just set at a set number of frames???? Given that If i do 16 frames at 256×256, I can usually squeeze quite a few more frames into my sprite sheet, so I more often than not want a strange number of frames like 21 or 25.

So in a nut shell, why does it not scale the animation?

[peterigz]

At the moment it doesn’t scale the animation because it’s simply recording what you create in the editor. So if an effect lasts 16 frames, that’s what it records because it’s having to interpret all of the graph data that creates the effect. I think if I’m to implement this then I’ll have to add a toggle button to the animation controls to fix the animation as it is, and then if you change the number of frames there after it scales the animation based on the frame data it has by interpolating between the frames. I’m not sure how well it will work though because if the effect has complicated graphs, then interpolating between the frames as they’re scaled may create some unwanted effects.

Maybe I can solve it with a new time control attribute of some kind that allows you to control the frame rate if the effect, which might actually be quite cool anyway. I’ll definitely look at a solution though. For now a workaround might be to change the global life attribute of the effect to make it last longer/shorter as required.

[duncanperham]

Thanks for the quick positive reply. I think adding this ability will improve the program a lot.

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