Pikarus

I totally am still interested in a proper python implementation, I have not yet had the time to do it myself, although I have progressed beyond pygame and moved on to Kivy. Perhaps the code used to implement it in pygame will be easily transferable to kivy style since it uses pygame in the background as well, but I guess we will see. Hoping you are still planning on working on this.

Intentional? Also, it seems inter-forum links from before update won't work now, the urls for topics are composed differently now.

Excellent Job, I got home from work and hit --> 'b', enter and it was like kAbLaMM new look! :P I have yet to explore much features, but the layout is nice EDIT: hey look, a like system :)

If you select the topmost bone in the group, the upper arm bone for instance, then hit Z it will seelct all children bones and all the sprites attached to those bones. Then hold CTRL and drag or rotate that bone and you will get a duplicate arm. This thread has a shortcuts list that will be useful to you as well. EDIT: Thread link was to old forum. Fixed it to point to the shortcuts topic in the updated forum.

This is a duplicate thread, and you got a reply in the other one. Please try to refrain from creating identical threads in the future :)

Congrats on 1.0!

*Cheers wildly*

I imagine the admins will ask you which version and operating system you are running before they can help you.

This video can show how to make the character switch which arm holds the sword. But as far as doing it entirely with the basic platform pack? Not 100% on this but I believe it would require additional images. to allow the arm to cross the body. This animation is totally doable with Spriter though. EDIT: didn't notice my failed embed attempt. fixed now.

This might be of use to you Shortcuts http://www.brashmonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=12357

well there are other ways to do this faster. Select the highest bone in the heirarchy (the beginning of the chain) i.e. the upper leg bone. Then just hit 'Z' All children of that bone become selected, sprites as well unless you turn LOCK SPRITES on then Z will select all the bones below the leg. Then shift-drag the foot while highlighting its tip. Much faster, and doesn't require the CTRL button.

If you select say the upper leg bone, then hold ctrl and click the lower leg bone, then click the foot bone (while still holding ctrl) then you will have three bones selected. Let go ctrl. Highlight the foot bone near its tip. The rotate icon (curved doubleheaded arrow) will appear. Now hold SHIFT and click and hold Left-Mouse. While you drag the foot it will control the whole leg. Is that what are you trying to achieve?

This effect can be achieved in free version also, although it takes a two-bone setup. example: I used one bone to define the rotation (the path) and I gave that bone a child bone, to which I attached an image. there are four keyframes here, one for each direction (starts east, then south at 250ms, west at 500ms, north at 750ms) and the animation is set to loop (tween) back to the first keyframe. At each of the (south west north) keyframes I adjusted the child bones rotation to make the chest piece point straight up (or could have aimed it anywhere but to cancel roation this is how you would do it.) You can make other neat things happen, here is one way to extend this image.

I appreciate the reply Mike and am glad to hear that. I know I might seem to have more ideas (or at least more chosen to be shared) than the average forumite here but to be honest, that's not a new thing for me. I tend to get excited about things I become interested in, and am always thinking of ways expand my horizons and the ones of those around me. However, I also don't want to inundate the forum with ideas or to flood the forum with a million and one 'suggestions' (see the feature suggestion thread) so if I seem over-excited please let me know and I will try to hold my tongue (fingers) a little. Either way it's just that I dream big, and think Spriter really deserves big dreams :P Cheers.

I would like to propose that not only can the software be advanced, but so perhaps also can the website itself, and by extension the forum. The first thing I noticed, before I even downloaded the program, was that there is no inbox and thus no private messaging available. I wonder if this was done on purpose, and if so, I can see a few reasons that would be a valid design choice, but at the same time, I feel it could be an enhancement to the community to allow people to initiate conversations directly between each other, rather than always posting a public discussion. Sometimes you just might not feel your topic is justified as a full forum thread, and I'm sure many thoughts or questions have gone by the wayside to avoid cluttering the public airspace (screenspace?). Other things that could be implemented are a chat room, shoutbox etc. as well as new sections of the website devoted to reputable tutorials elsewhere on the web for things related to animation, art and game development in general. I feel like this site could be not just a place for people to learn how to use the software itself, but how to develop art for games/movies or other purposes, with information ranging from the general to the very specific, from the basic to the very advanced, and that the community of Spriter could become a hub of artistic sharing of all types. If anyone has other thoughts about possible additions to the forum or website, I'm sure everyone (as I am) would be all ears (or is that eyes.)

This is a repeat of something I had posted in the b10 bug thread, but it's kind of frustrating me, so I will post it again here. Running Windows XP. Holding down Right-Click on a selected bone brings up the anchor/inheritance menu, but I can't select any option, and spriter stops responding, until I hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE, then the window disappears and I can again use spriter. EDIT: Upon further investigation of this frustration it turns out, that while the anchor/inheritance window is opened, although it may SEEM like nothing is responding, in fact I was wrong. If I click the anchor, spriter simply does not visually update the popup menu in any way, and does not allow the window to close either, giving the illusion that nothing happened, but when I CTRL-ALT-DELETE (which is still seemingly the only way I can successfully close the menu, the anchor point suddenly shows up, the window disappears, and the anchor then works as expected. Upod subsequently reopening the popup menu, now the graphics have changed to reflect the current state of the options selectable there, but again once I choose an option, I have to CTRL-ALT-DELETE to 'wake up' spriter and continue. So in conclusion, although for some reason I seem to be affected by a bug, it is more the graphical representation of the UI itself that is having an error, not the actual features. Therefor, I suppose it is not a high priority to fix it, although it is still mildly puzzling. Either way, again I would just like to say thanks to Mike and Edgar for starting this project, you have already managed to create a beautiful program, and I am sure things are only going to get better.

Thanks Mike. Yeah I tried and it does indeed work properly with no unexpected results.

The list continues. I have just downloaded Spriter b11 and have discovered that something hasn't changed that I expected might have. Perhaps it was by design... but at any rate: When using onion skins, the first keyframe (perhaps only if that keyframe is at time entry 0) will not show up even though I dragged the red onion skin 'object/highlighted region' (for lack of a better term) far to the left of the 0 time entry. I think it should show any keyframe you have highlighted, not just keyframes the onion skin 'object's endpoint is past. I have not checked whether this behaviour applies to any keyframe the onion skins' endpoint lies exactly on or if it just the time entry at 0, but I'm sure that wouldn't be too difficult to check. Could simply be a change from '<' to '<=' that would 'fix' this. Another thing is I think it would be neat if when you right-click any object, be it in the canvas or the palette or the z-order widgets, that more options would be present than the 4 currently available (Show all, hide selected, unlock all, lock selected). A more context sensitive menu would be of use. As an example, some options in this context menu could be doing things right at the coordinate of the canvas you clicked, such as: 'Create Action Point here.', 'Insert [highlighted object in palette] here.', 'Insert [highlighted object in palette with default pivot point here.]', 'Change selected sprite to skin.' (and vice-versa), 'Flip selected object(s) horizontally/vertically', 'Delete [object]' etc. A third thing I'd like to see is a more fully-realized onion skin mode (toggleable between standard and full behaviour) where even the tweened frames would show up in the onion, at different transparancy levels to denote distance of the frame from current frame in the timeline, somewhat like how flash does it. Another thing that might be useful is the ability to (while using fullchain constraint IK) is to have rotation disabled for one or more bones in said chain, so you could have for instance the foot rotate, the hip rotate, the pelvis rotate, but force the knee to maintain its orientation relative to its child and parent (and thus the upper and lower leg sprites would maintain the same relative orientation). I am sure as always, many of my suggestions are overcomplicated or pipedreamish, but I love to dream so I'm ok with that. Cheers.

Is it best to uninstall b10 and install b11 or will installing b11 on top of b10 likely not create any issues?

Thanks for the reply Mike. Yeah, when I was looking at a few sites prior to making this animation, I had come across several explanations of the up and the down pose as well, and of course that is one thing that is missing from the animation. There are many other problems with the animation I created, but since it was mainly an exploratory exercise most of those other things are trivial. Some of them one might notice within a minute or two of watching the cycle: His front arm is smaller than the back one. It also moves at a dramatically different rate and to different forward and backward extents (this effect is not very noticeable due to the angle the character is being viewed at which isn't straight) His two hands are in fact the same image, thus the back arm looks a tad wrong even though the hand graphic Almost suits either arm equally well. His shoulders and hips should tilt in opposite directions at certain points due to the legs changing relative height. I'm sure there are more minor blemishes that I could iron out, but I had drawn the various body parts with my graphics tablet in about an hour total just to get a basic character up and 'running' (lol) and to be able to make some mistakes I could learn from. I feel that Spriter can be a non-artists dream-tool for animation as this whole animation took maybe 3 hours to make, and I already have plans to make a slightly more detailed "base-character" in 8 directions of movement that I can skin to make various different humanoids with a vast set of animations. I have thought about trying to learn Blender in order to export image data to work with Spriter but that's probably something I will put off for now. Either way thanks again for taking the time to answer my post and I will check out that video to see what else I can learn from it. Hope to be here for a while (read: permanently)

I have been programming since I was 11 years old in various languages, although never released anything, more just had a lot of fun teaching myself new languages and messing around with stuff for my own nefarious purposes. I have a few projects on the go, and while I am NOT the best artist, I aspire to be better so that I can produce the art for my game myself. Anyways, without further ado, here is: a basic, untweaked, glitchy walk cycle. I know it's got some issues xD but its a first effort lol.

Either way the current tool is I'm sure more than sufficient for most needs. Thanks for your input.

I had this problem and fixed it by placing the dll file directly in the Spriter program folder. Problem instantly went away. EDIT: I have now discovered a bug myself. Running Windows XP. Holding down Right-Click on a selected bone brings up the anchor/inheritance menu, but I can't select any option, and spriter stops responding, until I hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE, then the window disappears and I can again use spriter.

I realize I've not yet received any feedback on the quality (or lack there-of) of my previous suggestions, and in reality since my post I realize many of those suggestions are probably short-sighted and perhaps unnecessary. However, I have others. (No guarantees that the quality has improved) * Limitations on things like rotation (aka joint-range limits for an example) This is something that is mainly useful for things like humanoids for instance. Being able to manually set a max extent for various things such as rotation or x or y values of sprites or bones would allow you to do things like force a foot to remain on the ground while you move the rest of the body, or prevent your character from bending his/her/its elbow/knee etc too far and might result in an easier time in making animations by having the constraints do much of the tweaking you might normally have to do manually. These options could also remain local to the actual spriter data, as once the animation is completed, they could become irrelevant. EDIT: I do feel silly sometimes when I realize my enthusiasm sometimes precedes my investigative powers. It seems that at least to some degree, in spriter pro at least, this is implemented already though not to the full extent I have described. IK Locking Will manage this in certain instances. * Multiple layers to spriter projects Imagine a boss who is many times wider than a character fighting it. If the .scmls all had layers you could define then the boss' arm closest to the foreground would be able to pass all the way in front of the character and allow the boss to grab the character with both arms (the one in the back being behind the characters entire set of layers) Also, one could have swords literally stab someone in the gut, rather than fly in front of them, for instance. One other neat thing one could do with this is create object that orbit the character by changing layers. This could also be done with z-order, but with layers, would allow these objects to orbit any other entities in the same scene as well. *along with character maps, how about palette switches? *I notice there is a button to reload all images, which presumably would update changes to files. Is there a way to have a smart directory, so if a new file gets created in your project folder it will automatically show up in spriter? Or if not a smart directory, a 'Refresh directory contents' button would work.

Well, glad I looked here :) Turns out I was just thinking of posting this as an additional feature request in spriter. I wonder though, would this be easily modified to be able to support more image types? I am a big fan of Gimp, so being able to take a layered .png or .xcf file right into spriter would be equally convenient. (although I could of course export my image as a .psd from gimp as you mention) And further to this. Do you think it would be easy to program a slightly different mode/tool that does something similar but in a way totally opposite thing (as follows) *Import a multiple-frame image as a single sprite, but each frame making up a separate keyframe in spriter, dispersed evenly across the timeline?