DanaLovesVidya

I came across a temporary fix September of last year and PM'ed it to Brash. Here is a copypasta of my PM to him: I hope this helps! I guess this thread got lost in the shuffle. Could be the only explanation as to why he hasn't posted here about it yet.

Hello. I made an animation in Spriter Pro, but when I try to export it to a GIF, Spriter crashes before the gif is made. Attempting to export to a sprite sheet goes through the motions, but the png is never there in the end. Is this a known issue?

It works on the old laptop. Problem is I don't know how I ever survived working on that thing. It's so god-awful slow. It's painful. I also forgot to mention one more bug: Holding shift and resizing a sprite piece initially doesn't stretch it proportionately. You have to stretch the piece, CTRL+Z back to where it was, and then shift-resize. Any news on having this HD bug fixed? I really want to use this software on my Surface.

This is coming from a non-expert, so if anyone else would like to chime in and correct me, feel free: The size of your sprites should work well within your game. Whether that's 300x300 or 74x74, do what's right for your game. It is best to make your game art so that you don't have to zoom in or out to get it to be the size you want it to be. So if it's supposed to be big, make it big. If it's supposed to be small, make it small. You can get away with some zooming, but it's usually bad practice because you lose information and increase the chances of blurriness if you're not using initial sizes. The more frames you have, the smoother your animation will be. FPS does play into this, but if you have the time to make your animations have more frames, you'll have less issues of it not looking "right" at certain moments. This usually is a non-factor with pixelly/retro games, though, so don't make more work for yourself than necessary. If you're making a 2D fighter like Street Fighter 3 Third Strike, you'll want TONS of frames of animation. If you're making a retro sidescroller, you can probably get away with significantly fewer frames of animation, unless you're going for a very fluid walk motion. The more you place on a sprite sheet, generally the better. Say you have every single sprite on one file. That means your game has only one file to load. Split each asset up into different sheets, and then you have more loading. Split it down even more to 1 "pose" per file, and it's just unruly. However, you need to make developing easy on yourself. Usually people find a happy medium and put all of the sprites for each asset in their own sprite sheet, that way you aren't loading a million files and everything stays organized. The key is to know your sprite sheets. The more you know them, the easier it will be for you to use them. Make sure the sprites on each sheet are spaced appropriately, for just in case you use an engine that will auto-cut the sheet for you. For instance, I have an arrow that moves in one direction, and loops around itself. It has 93 frames of animation and each frame moves it one pixel. This is probably overkill, but I'm using it for reference here anyways. So there are 93 frames, I organized them on a 10x10 sprite sheet. So when I import the animated arrow into Construct 2, I can say there are 10 columns and 10 rows, and simply delete the extra, empty frames that are generated by the blank spaces at the end of the sprite sheet. Most importantly: Make sure it makes sense for YOU. Best practices are best practices, but if they hinder your progress, take whatever shortcuts you need to take and worry about optimization when you see the shortcuts actually affecting your game's performance. However if you have the time, it never hurts to do everything right the first time (technically you save time by doing that).

Y'know maybe I can fire up the craptop (old Toshiba Satellite) and get it working on there. I can designate it as my "Spriter Machine" and just cloud save everything. It's a hassle but less of a hassle than not being able to use it at all. I'll let you know if that works out when I give it a go. Thanks for the 2nd monitor suggestion. Unfortunately my workspace is a couch in a small apartment, so laptops are my only option. Luckily I still have Steam on my old machine.

BrashAdmin, Unfortunately none of the fixes worked. Disabling scaling doesn't produce any results. Re-enabling scaling and making everything bigger or smaller still scales the object properties menu as a whole, so it's out of whack no matter how big or small it is on the display. Thank you for getting back to me so soon. I really wish there was a fix for this. New technology tends to run us into a stumble some times. Man it's such a bummer because I was so looking forward to trying out this software. Dana

I can't use scaleX or other tools in the object properties because it looks like this: http://gyazo.com/46c23ec2208ffd19c58637c758b8bd3e Is this a known bug? How can I fix this? I just got the software and it's a bit frustrating not being able to use it even just to follow the tutorials.