status update

[lucid]

Hi Everyone,

Our apologies again for the prolonged period without a new build. We have been and continue to work very long hours since the previous release and throughout the holiday season to get Spriter Pro ready for its release as quickly as possible, while continuing to improve its useability and stability at the same time.

It became obvious after the last build release that an investment now it some massive optimizations and code organizing will result in a drastically better user experience with the finished product and more importantly, make adding in the remaining missing features much easier and less prone to bugs. The upcoming version, Spriter will be out of alpha, and into beta.

This optimization process, while wielding fantastic results already, is taking longer than we had hoped, but the fact remains, it will be well worth this investment of time, and more importantly, its definitely the best way to proceed.

As a result, it's clear Spriter Pro won't be ready for release until some time Q1 of 2013, but there will certainly be many new builds between then and the impending next release.

Regarding the next release, we can't guarantee an exact date, but it should be within the next two weeks and should feature:

A drastically faster and more responsive UI, (exponentially faster with growing scene complexity)

A new, easier to understand and use bone re-parenting system.

Selections persistent with changing frames, or even animations.

Sprtiter will no longer autokey when making selections. You must make a change or click the make key icon.

undo/redo restores previous selection

ability to set default pivot points to each image.

improved object/asset management.

share objects between animations

create multiple characters (sets of animations, such as player, effects, enemies etc) per file.

combine characters from other files.

finalized stable core, approaching 1.0 reliability

first beta version of Spriter

groundwork will be established for quick implementation of upcoming features up to and beyond 1.0

We will continue to push to get Spriter as feature complete and easy to use as quickly as we can and then polished and rock solid as shortly as possible thereafter. We can not begin to express our gratitude to all of you for your continued support and patience as we continue our quest to make the most flexible, powerful, and fun to use 2d game animating tool possible. It won't be much longer and we won't let you down! We understand, an extension to the delay is not the best news, but we can assure you things are progressing steadily, and the length of the delay will be reflected in the massive improvements you will see in the coming weeks.

Edgar and Mike at BrashMonkey.

[Trumgottist]

Your focus on stability and code optimisation is appreciated. It's very much a good thing that you're not afraid to adjust the schedule to do these things. (Assuming of course, that it'll give the expected result.)

Happy new year! (I plan for 2013 to be the year where I add Spriter support to my engine, and start using it properly.)