are you talking about timelines in flash? that are translating to GMS?
Yes, the animation timeline in Flash or Animate etc, I'm not sure what other timeline you thought I was talking about?
All animation must be in the main timeline (in Flash/Animate etc) as per the manual, otherwise only the first frame of embedded movie clips will be shown throughout the length of the main timeline animation when played back in GMS. (Like in the clock example I gave above)
It's one of many reasons why using swf for anything more than art with simple shapes, colouring and animation has so many hurdles, workarounds and performance issues to be almost pointless.
I talk about it a little here, amongst other reasons why GMS isn't the go to tool for people wanting to make games using high res digital art.
Also, back to the original point - none of the above relates to showing only 1 frame in the sprite editor when you load a swf file - which it sounded like you were confusing in your previous post.
...makes complete sense as you've described it.
Totally.
I'm very glad I was able to learn this all just now.
Thanks a LOT for your efforts in explaining!
No problem, just bare in mind what you want to do with your graphics going forward (animation complexity, shape complexity, effects etc) and decide whether using swf will be suitable for them after considering all the caveats, issues and performance hits of using them with GMS, as opposed to a normal Flash/Animate environment where they are created.
I mean you can create a lovely gradient or whatever in Flash/Animate, but load that into GMS and you're gonna have a bad time with texture swaps. I had ~50 from 20 64x64 sprites placed on an asset later.
Create an animation with movie clips to help manage a complex animation - great, but GMS ain't gonna playback half of it - for that you need a sprawling mess of everything all on the main timeline etc etc
Note I'm not saying these thing
can't be worked around with some planning and a lot of extra work, and some projects and art styles will work great even with the drawbacks - as I said above, simple shapes, basic colours and none complex animations would be fine.
I'm saying that we shouldn't
need to work around these issues.
It's nearly 2018 and we can't use a gradient?