Ascorbius

Do we have any dates penned for the release? It'd sure help me in my planning if I could know when the actual spriter app would be ready - as good as the Alpha is, it's not quite enough for serious work. If it's going to be late in the year, let me know - knowing that is better than hoping for a release in the next month or so. Thanks

Adding extra keyframes for the export is an option, however it suffers from a major drawback to efficiency. My simple example would be easy, but my animations are not simple. First of all, the key frames would have to be placed exactly where needed once animation had been completed - pretty much baking the animation as making changes once these additional keyframes were added would be a nightmare - so the option is to delete them prior to modification and then add them again prior to export. Time consuming. On top of that, files exported for the actual animation keyframes would have to be deleted and the rest of the exported files renamed to be sequential. This is not an option I'm afraid. For a single character in my game, the animation set currently consists of 8 animations, there are still at least 3 more needed. Each animation is around a second long. A considerable amount of time must be spent tweaking the frames before they can be put into texturepacker and scaled to the correct size. I can work with what I have in the short term, but it's far from perfect and there must be a better way. Again, these aren't complaints: These are use cases which I believe will apply to a great number of users.

Hi, I've been using Spriter now for a couple of months, I've worked out a set of animations for a game I'm working on which I'm happy with and I wish to implement them into my game - however I've run into a little roadblock in my pipieline. The problem is twofold: A: I'm using MOAI and the plugin being developed at the moment (in the developers' own time and I appreciate that) doesn't support bones or mirroring (by my initial inspection) - So unless I want to reinvent the wheel (which I really don't) I will patiently wait before I use the skeletal animation possibilities (which drew me to spriter) - (I have written a skeletal animation system previously in another engine so I appreciate how much work goes into it. ) B: The export to png feature only exports the absolute keyframes and not interpolated frame renders over time as I initially thought. Point A is something I am willing to devote a considerable amount of patience to, given that the person developing the Moai plugin is doing so of their own volition and thus far, unpaid by yours truly. Point B befuddles me though.. Given that Spriter has the ability to create the most wonderfully smooth animations over a time line would anyone only wish to export only the key frames? I tested this tonight, I created an animation of a single image rotating by 179 degrees over 1000ms, there were 2 keyframes - the initial and the final. Export to png yielded only 2 images. Why is this useful? Surely I would want 24 images ( or more, based on some setting. ) This suggests that animators must either work with 24 exact keyframes for their walk/run cycles and move their bones to exactly where they need to be - only on those key frames - negating the usefulness of keyframes in the first place, or maybe the export serves some other purpose which I am not yet aware of. I realize that this post seems to be quite negative for which I apologize, this is not my normal approach. I also appreciate that the project has been delayed by a serious injury in the team, I am not heartless in this matter. I would also like to add that I am very impressed with the majority of Spriter - even in it's current Alpha state. I really look forward to being able to use it to make some seriously great animations. You achieved more than I managed with my own bone editor for my skeletal animation system. My bones were forced into a single rigid hierarchy and I couldn't change images per keyframe either. However I am still in a pickle. I have animations I would like to export for use within my game, but I have no way (without a lot of code on my part) to use them. My pipeline is blocked. Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions to ease me on my way? Is there a 3rd party tool which can take my Spriter project and render the animations - scaled to the correct size? With great respect. Jason Farmer aka Ascorbius (note: there is no sarcasm in this post, just honest 'trying to get something done' frustration, which may mask the love I have for the software - for that I apologize. It is my desire that you are successful for I see the potential of this software.)

My bad on the Z-index stuff.. seems like it does animate in the OIF view. Still stuck on the flipping though.

OK, I'm loving Spriter and I'm looking forward to the full release. It's allowing me to do some great things but I'm hitting a wall with something. First of all, how to I make something go to the background as part of an animation? I've got a skeleton, I've attached sprites to it and I've got a nice rig to animate. However I need to be able to position items in the Z-axis. For instance: An archer reaches behind his head to pull an arrow from his quiver. The hand has to go behind the head to pull an arrow for a few frames then be back at the front with arrow to complete the animation. I can't find any Z-Axis control at all at apart from dragging objects around in the Objects In Frame view. This doesn't animate though. If this animated, I could use it to achieve what I described. Secondly, how do I easily flip a sprite in the X or Y axis? Say an animation calls for a head to turn from right to left and back, following a tennis game. I want to use the same face sprite just mirrored. I can't find any way to do this. Thanks in advance and Great work so far.

Hi Milet, I just wanted to post on here to give you some encouragement. I'm investigating Moai as a potential (and very likely) candidate for our next game - we're keeping things old school, 2D platforms -but with Skeletal animation sprites (built in Spriter) I've run your previous example without bones and it works like a charm (when the minor tweak is made for the angles and the smooth animation). I'm really impressed with your progress thus far. We'd like to use the bones though, so I'm hoping that you're making good progress :) I wish you the best and hope that if you need any assistance, I'll help if I can. 8-)