charlieman

Hi Johanes, I got the beta Spriter working with Wine on Linux, my post here might help you with this. That error message will probably go away if you copy the XAPOFX1_1.dll file into that Temp directory the error tells you. I must also add that the directx and c++2008 runtimes the installer tries to install didn't work. I got the directx one from winetricks (d3dx9), but the c++2008 (vcrun2008) didn't work from there neither, copying that file did the trick instead. Hope it helps, good luck!

If the window toolkit is still not set in stone, I'd like to propose using Qt. It has awesome cross-platform compatibility and you can still use OpenGL directly on it (and DirectX too, but if you are targeting both Windows and MacOS, OpenGL makes more sense, and you also get it to work on Linux as a byproduct ;) ). Just check out some of the demos: http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.7/demos-affine.html It can also be made to look like the current beta, since Qt uses stylesheets similar to CSS to customize the appearance. Â Â

Will spriter manage mouse events? I guess it would make sense for touch screen devices... Maybe we can get ideas from CSS, it has a pointer-events property. I think from there I can see 3 possible values that could work with spriter: none: The element is never the target of mouse events; however, mouse events may target its descendant elements if those descendants have pointer-events set to some other value. visible:The element can be the target of a mouse event when the visibility property is set to visible and the mouse cursor is over the element. all: The element can only be the target of a mouse event when the pointer is over the element. The value of the visibility property do not effect event processing. This visibility would be the hidden attribute Thinksquirrel proposed. On the other hand, this could be simply set in the custom properties for the sprite some people where proposing and manage it entirely on the game engine.

About the folder/file structure and swapping, what if instead you kept it as the simple list of images, and added "name" and "set" attributes? Several images could share a name but be from different sets, so there are some "head" images where one belongs to the "normal" set, another one to "armored", "evil", etc. It's basically moving the functionality from the parent element to an attribute in the image. Would this work with what you have in mind?

+1, this will also help for attaching other sprites, like weapons, on the character. I also like the idea of separating Spriter and SCML data with namespaces in the same file. How does the version in the document_info part work? Will the animator have to increase it manually or will it be automatic? What about a last_modified attribute with a timestamp as well/instead? About rotation and the y axis I think they should be CCW and positive up, the conversion to each platform should be left to the xml loader. Maybe we should add a poll? :D

I just tested SpriterBeta on wine and got it working! I tested it under Debian testing with wine version 1.1.38 (from the wine-unstable package). In order to get it working I installed d3d9x_36 with winetricks. Then I ran Spriter and it closed with the "Failed to load plugin" problem a lot of people seems to have. This error will show a temp directory with a randomly created name. I Copied the file XAPOFX1_1.dll from a Windows installation(*) to that directory (~/.wine/drive_c/windows/profiles/username/Temp/cap3ef.tmp in my case) and it fixed that. Seems like Spriter is trying to load that dll from this temp directory instead of System32, maybe this info might help the Windows users who encounter this same problem. Then ran it with: $ WINEDEBUG=warn+all wine Spriter.exe And it just worked! Here are more screenshots: As you can see the UI is glitchy around the text inputs, when you click them the text appears for a split second and disappears, but you can still write the number and press enter. The maximize button didn't do anything, but pressing it allowed me to move and resize the window. The main functions of the program work, it can create new spriter files, add animations, sprites, keyframes and save them. I'll try to install the latest wine stable from their site (1.4) to see if some of these things are fixed there. I don't know if Linux support was added on the Kickstarter (in the FAQ I only see Mac), but porting for both might get much easier by compiling the program directly with winelib. (*) From the Windows/SysWOW64 directory since wine only runs 32bit dlls, for a 32bit Windows you'd need to get it from the System32 directory.