Mike at BrashMonkey

Hi,
2 years ago I discovered Spriter. Since then I did tons of animations and one of my favorites are the animations of my skeleton game assets.
 










When you use Spriter the right way you can create animations like this
Not all skeleton characters shown here but there are plenty more of them..
 
 
The whole package is available here: Graphicsriver
here GameDev Market
and here Itch.io
or even here Scirra Store
 
I have even updated the package to version 1.1 and added a run animation + white skin for each skeleton like this

 
I am still planning to add more content like a musketeer, samurai skeleton etc and also more animations but lets see how this turns out. Although people who buy are really happy sales are actually not much promising. I don't know why  
 
Here a bonus:
This was done per request. The task was to make a drunken skeleton animation.

 
And when you weren't bored all the way and really reached bottom of my post you can actually DOWNLOAD A FREE SKELETON CHARACER WITH SPRITER FILE FOR FREE!
Download Free Skeleton Character
Enjoy  

Very cool addition Stranger Games. Thanks so much on behalf of the Spriter community.

Visual Novel for Dialogue System for Unity is released. It is the only visual novel asset with builtin support to Spriter animation.
Keep in mind that it requires Dialogue System for Unity to function correctly.
 
I didn't have time to do it, but I will do it and do a pull request as soon as I have time. Your plugin is great, and I will be happy to contribute to it.

The reference is a bit incomplete with perhaps a few typographical type errors. It's a good idea to also references any of the open-source Spriter implementations and if you have any specific questions, please don't hesitate to email lucid@brashmonkey.com and he will clarify as best he can.
 

You could use the art and apply bones etc, but keep in mind, due to the required perspective changes in any angle except perfect side view, you cant animate a character walking upward or downward simply by moving or stretching bones... for this you need Spirter's image swapping feature and hand drawn variants for each frame of the limb during a walk etc. This is why traditional games only have 3 frames for walking and why we only provide the same 3 frame style.  To do otherwise becomes exponentially more time-consuming and therefore expensive.

Look into swapping out texture images in Unity.. this can be done manually to reproduce what we call "character maps" in Spriter, for things like swapping out weapons, armor type, cape on/off etc.

If you're using Unity, you might want to look into using actual 3d models where the weapons etc are separate objects which could be swapped out. Depending on how many angles you want, how many moves, etc etc, this might produce far better results far faster and less expensively.

There might be possible options, both pretty darned complicated.
There is a way to override the animations control over sprites or bones so they can be controlled in real-time by C2, but I've honestly never used that feature myself. I'll bring this thread to Edgar (Spriter's programmer and the creator of the C2 plugin) to see if he can link you to further info.

Aside from that option, yes, you could separate the upper body or just the arm in Spriter to be a separate Spriter object, then anchor it to the character sprite, synchronize animations, and then add recoil animations... this option would be very time consuming, first to break up the character and their arm into separate Spriter files, then to properly event everything to stick the arm to the character Spriter object and properly synchronize everything.

That's a setting for Spriter playback in the game, not in Spriter. If you want to play the animation once in Spriter without looping, right click the standard play-button instead of left clicking it. 

Thanks for reporting this Wicked, I just reproduced/confirmed this bug. I'll make sure Edgar knows ASAP.
 

When I click the Current Time field above the timeline to jump to a frame, the numbers highlight as they should. But if I start typing in a frame number to jump to, instead of changing the numbers, the software takes the inputs as shortcut keys and I usually end up locking sprites, hitting play, and a bunch of other stuff before realizing the numbers are not changing. I can't edit the numbers until I double-click on the numbers again (un-highlight and re-highlight). It does this every time I go to click on the Current Frame field. This is pretty annoying. I am on Windows 7 Pro. Spriter 10.

very glad to help. certainly no need for apologies
Cheers.

Something like this is planned for Spriter 2, but almost certainly won't make it into Spriter Pro, as the entire data structure and core code of Spriter woulsd have to be changed, which would not only further postpone Spriter 2, but it would also break compatibility with all existing Spriter API's.

Hi Mike,
Thats ok then. Thanks a lot for the response! I am an absolute beginner in making Sprite. I'll see how it goes with the one I've got right now first . If I like it, no doubt I will contact you to get the stand alone version - to support your company  
 
best regards
 
alex

damn thanks mike :/
I've made a petition for it and I'm thinking about posting it on the Rpgmaker MV forums, but I'm not too sure how many people would be interested, it would mean a lot if you could possibly mention this petition in a stickied post or on the news section for me, thanks so much. (Also I used the spriter logo in the petition, if you're not okay with that PM me and I will change it!)
Petition Link: https://www.change.org/p/kadokawa-corporation-rpgmaker-mv-spriter-support

It's a Parblo coast GT22. http://parblo.com/parblo-gt22-hd-tablet-monitor

I just got it working! I downloaded 32bit and 64bit vcredist files for visual studio 2010 also and installed them and now it seems to be working.

Steam is a completely different company/marketplace system, and you retrieve the products you buy from Steam differently. 

You'll find the Essentials in the following directory: 
<Steam Installation Directory>/SteamApps/common/Spriter/Art Packs/Essentials 

Hi and welcome to the board. 
Animation looks good so far. Meshdeform is not as needed as you think. It makes things a bit more slow to finish without the feature but doable. Just slice up everything in parts. For things like clothes add some cloth pieces and frame independently each using linear tween (starting point to end point, easy peasy.. so you dont need a gazillion frames just for a little cloth moving(one of the most powerfull tools of spriter imho). For swapping parts control the transition speed so it does not look wonky. You can look at tombmonkey's work here, extremelly good without deforming feature (I tweaked his work to learn).
I can say with practice now that mesh deform is not needed in my case (faster to finish works, yes but not indispensable)).
Dont forget that meshdeforming feature in other programs is not always possible to export 100% to game engines (in data format that is the most convenient memory wise).
Cheers.

Hi!
Could it be possible to add orthogonal movement of sprites? I mean, ability to lock sprite to it's x or y-axis. In photoshop for example, it works by holding shift and moving layer up, down, left or right. This could be handy when making sine wave snake movement, closing doors etc.
Best Regards,
AreCustomize

Thanks for the reply. As much as I value your opinion, the point I was trying to make is that more testing is needed, I just gave some examples in order not to sound negative but constructive. I know that the current approach to testing is cheap and efficient, but I would advise proper testing sessions, mainly on usability and user experience. Hire 4 testers with different skill levels on Spriter (minimum for a limited budget, testers usually take 50$/hour), and observe how they approach the product. Ask questions, like "Do they get it?", ask them to perform key tasks and watch how they work. I think this will not only reveal bugs, but even usability issues. 
Personally I don't have the time to test right now, even though I want to help improve Spriter. I am using Win 10. Regarding Ctrl+D, that's a functionality for copying an object into all frames: https://puu.sh/tb1Y4/fe40ba978f.png Regarding the trial version, there was a video that mentioned that and I was surprised and I didn't download the latest patch thinking that I would lose access. If I find the video I ll link it as an edit.

Welcome duperduckey,
The best way to make such decisions is to start by making a mock-up (fake) screen of your game at the actual target resolution.
So, say for example you want your game to run at a high-res 1920x1080, you should start by making a fake screen (using layers) in a program like Photoshop or Krita (which is awesome and FREE  www.krita.org) of your game, including the player sprite, HUD and generic enemies.
 
This will hep you figure out exactly how big your player sprite needs to be.

Typically, once I do this, I then actually create the player sprite and animate it at 2x the required size in Spriter. This allows me wo work faster and a little sloppier with my art, because eventually I'll scale it back down to the actually needed resolution, and when you reduce art to 50 percent, it cleans up nicely. (don't do this if you're making a retro low-res pixel art game)

Do NOT work at crazy print resolutions!

I hope this helps.
 
 

I installed both 32 (first) and 64bit.
 

I installed spriter on a Microsoft Surface Pro 4 and I got several DLL errors even after installing  Visual Studio 2013 C++ runtime.  That said, I downloaded/installed  Visual Studio 2010 C++ runtime and it resolved my problem.  Thought I'd mention it incase it helps anyone.

Edit: Putting my personal practice project on hold. Someone asked me to provide assets for their mobile game so i decided to try a different style and collaborate with them . Hope it works out.
Current progress:  https://gyazo.com/385e62617015e0cdc03058eba01e523d
 
 
I decided to post my recent idle animation after finally figuring out Spriter. Great software by the way. I only wish there was a mesh feature. Other programs out there that include it are way out of my budget (spine) so I settled for Spriter Pro. Anyway, Here's my very first animation. Going to work on a small 1 level game as a way to learn about programing, improving art, and Japanese (details in the description of my DA page). Next up, running animation \ouo/.

 

Thanks for all your awesome work, it looks great! I look forward to trying this in my project.
Happy Holidays!

Okay... I am done... except for the LWJGL implementation, which I won't implement now, since it takes more effort to code a usable one and it seems that everyone uses LibGDX anyway.
Every specific implementation has its own project:
Generic, required by every implementation: https://github.com/Trixt0r/spriter
LibGDX: https://github.com/Trixt0r/gdx-spriter
Slick2D: https://github.com/Trixt0r/slick2d-spriter
Java2D: https://github.com/Trixt0r/java2d-spriter