Hello Brashmonkey forums! Lucid - the lead programmer here

[lucid]

Hello everyone, I'm lucid (aka Edgar), I'm the programmer for the new Spriter. I apologize for my complete neglect of the forums, but I've done the same to all my family and friends irl, and working around the clock to get this Spriter up and running as quickly as possible. Also, for the length of this post, I have a bit to catch up on. ;) I hope when you see the new Spriter up and running, you'll love it as much as we do, and that you'll agree it was worth the wait. Here's a peek at the new interface, which I've worked very hard on integrating any feedback I've received to get it just right. (click image for quick example video)

It has things like dockable panels, and a zoomable timeline, and a host of other features and workflow improvement that have been requested by out budding userbase. The free version is now feature complete, and in beta, and will be in your hands shortly. The Construct Classic plugin is complete. The Torque2d plugin is well on its way. And the basic groundwork has been laid to start work on an HTML5/WebGL Construct 2 plugin, as well as the much requested Unity plugin.

I'll be back to working on Spriter itself very soon, as we've had to take a short break to prepare our video for a kickstarter.com campaign. As many of you know, Mike and I are the only employees for BrashMonkey, and this past 6 months blitz of Monster Energy Drink fueled coding fervor was funded out of pocket from my own savings. I can no longer afford to fund myself, but I'd like to continue to work on it fulltime, so I can continue the rapid development, and take you from the free version beta, to the fullfeatured 1.0 as quickly as possible, as well as get it on as many platforms and game engines as possible. Also, as you will see in our upcoming kickstarter video, there is much further that Spriter can go, with things like freely deformable images, a complete skeletal hierarchy with skinning to automatically bend your images around bones, and even procedurally animation! Without funding it will take much longer to get to 1.0, and things like skinning and procedural animation won't be possible, at least not in the forseeable future until Spriter has fully established itself, and the company has grown. With proper funding, I estimate all the aforementioned features will be there at least in beta form within a year.

I appreciate the great patience all of you have had while you were in the dark, and I was clicking away at my keyboard, but we're going to need your help soon not only to pledge if you can, but if you can't we need your help even more to spread the word of our kickstarter to every corner of the internet, to every developer, animator, and gamer you know - as well as to every forum, reddit, facebook page, chatroom that relates to these areas once this campaign is up and running. With your help we can spread the word to enough people who can realize the vast potential and get fully funded, to rocket towards a perfected 1.0 and beyond. Though I haven't had time to fully finish adding everything I want, even the tiniest details like "I tried pressing escape to deselect everything, and it didn't work, could you add that?" I've done my best to add. I want to continue to add all the major features and as many tiny features and improvements as possible so Spriter is not only as powerful as possible, but as streamlined, and just awesomely easy to use as possible. Aside from the development speed, the freedom to continue to pour love into every corner of the program and fix all bugs that undoubtedly will arise when you put a project like this in the hands of thousands as quickly as possible. Also I wanted to take advantage of every last dollar of my very limited self-funding, so I didn't have time to engage with the forum members, with funding I can become an active part of this forum, and together we can build an active community user community here, where everyone can get quick feedback and help, and I can engage daily.

I will discuss the features in greater detail once the kickstarter is up, but the as of yet unannounced features we'd like to add if we can get funded will blow your minds. So please get your fingers ready to click on as many "like", "thumbs up", and "favorite" as I can throw at you, and be ready to copy paste our kickstarter link to everyone and everything you can. Thanks again everyone. See you soon!

[skullsoft]

Hey brashmonkey.

I like your program! It's got many features that I've been wanting to have in an graphics program.

I have two bugs to report in Spriter:

1) After I exited a project, I reopened Spriter and started a new one. I dound that the Pallete tab was unable to open--it would make a funny little flicker, but I couldn't import any graphics. Reloading the program did not help. And I also found that I could not find any of my projects when i went to open one.

2) Twice now I have found the computer running extremely slowly while Spriter was open (I'm sure that it wasn;t just Spriter that was slow, because I tried various other tasks) and when I exited Spriter, the computer instantaneously went back to normal speed.

Any tips, particularly on the first problem?

Sorry to make the first post in this forum a bug report.

[lucid]

hi skullsoft,

There is a bit of a CPU hog issue which will be corrected as development continues. The early beta is pretty early for being released on such a wide scale. As far as the other bug. Are you saying the program is completely unusable now? Can you load the sample project from the installation directory?