Timeline/frame rate questions ?

[scottypp]

Hi, really loving this package so far but i am getting quite confused with the timeline and frame rate..or rather lack of it. How do i know what frame rate i am animating at? i cant see anywhere to set say 25 fps or 30 fps? ive just done a basic idle animation over 90 frames and when i hit play it goes at lightning speed! if i adjust the playback speed to 600% it slows down a bit but nowhere near 3 secs worth of time for example. Could someone please explain the logic of the frame rate to me please?

Also a couple of days ago i managed to scale the timeline up and down, now no matter what combo i try i just cant seem to get it working? In the demo it says left click in timeline...hold ctrl then middle click....nada! im using a MAC keyboard if that makes any difference? I've just been playing with the second box where it says timeline/current time.....by entering say 50 and applying it scales my timeline up but know i cant 'zoom' out of it? very confusing!!!

I really can see great potential for this package and really hope to be able to use it in my next games releases.

Regards

Scott.

[KFII]

Hi scottypp,

I'm just starting with Spriter and not a specialist about framerates etc, but I think Spriter generates the maximum quality of 2D animation possible, from what I saw you can modify the framerate only when you export to PNG images, Spriter will export all the images of your animation according to the settings panel that will pop up right before you export. Click on "File" then "Export to PNG."

Also funny enough; I just opened Spriter to observe what you are describing, and suddenly I have exactly the same bug happening: Animation is going at a crazy fast speed :p so I understand why you are confused, this is a bug, no matter how slow I set the animation (example -500%, which should be 5 times slower than the original speed,) the speed keeps being too fast compared to the animation I generated yesterday. Also here's how tha main project folder looks now, it no longer looks like a Windows 7 folder (the OS I'm using):

Edit: infact I have opened a version that was just before the last one, and the very recent one works just fine. That version that is now running too fast was previously broken because it was not possible to delete frames even when I deleted keyframes, so the super high speed may be just one other side effect of the broken data in the SCML file. But the folder thing is really weird (see image.)

[lucid]

Hi guys. Sorry about the confusion. You can expand the timeline window vertically to see the individual timelines. Mousewheel should zoom in and out (horizontally).

Spriter doesn't operate on FPS. I will add some previewing features that allow you to do that, but one of the main goals of Spriter is to provide a format to let you recreate the animation in realtime from individual sprites at runtime the way it's created in Spriter. So you're not actually editting frames, each keyframe has a time in milliseconds. But again, I will add the feature to preview at a certain FPS, because I know alot of people are using to export individual images.

The playback speed slider is just to allow you to preview the animation at different playback speeds. If you slow down the speed to 10% and watch it playback smoothly and slowly you can see one of the advantages of real time time based modular animation rather than fps based. Also -500% isn't slow it's 5 times the speed backward. 5% or 10% would be very slow playback.

As far as the folder thing. I think you may be having another problem with your OS, Spriter does absolutely no operations on folders aside from reading the contents

Let me know if that helps at all

[KFII]

Hi Lucid,

Thank you for all your clarifications:

Whoops, you're right -500% is 5 times the speed but in reverse! I just forgot that while I was trying to slow down the animation and it kept being in turbo mode no matter what :)

As for the folder issue, this never happened anywhere else than on this folder on my Windows 7, it's the first time I see this, here is what I think created the problem:

- One SCML file was broken, I kept it in the main folder (for possible bug reporting,)

- Created a new SCML file for the same animation and images,

- Tested the new SCML animation in Construct 2, worked good enough (minor issues,)

- The day after I opened the broken SCML file by mistake from "File" > Open recent Project.

And that's when I saw the folder thing, maybe there's some interaction that happens in the files once imported in Construct 2, which is why I always create an independent copy of the SCML file with a different name, just to make sure the original SCML is not altered, would creating an SCML copy in the same folder with a different name cause problems? I'll continue observing different ways of doing stuff :) thanks again for your help!

[scottypp]

Thanks for replying guys! i figure the playback speed out not long after posting...DOH! and thats good to know about the export options.

Hi Lucid, good to know you are planning to implement a fps preview, that will be very handy. As for the timeline problem, vertically expansion is straightforwar and not an issue, its the expanding horizontally to zoom in and out of frame ranges that i just cant get to work. The mousewheel does nothing. Plus i use a wacom cintiq and pen to animate with ( i cant use a mouse due to RSI) in TVPaint they have a nice little tab that you click and scroll left and right to zoom in or out....any chance of something similar? its a function i use all the time to animate so not having it functioning is a real obstacle to me.

Cheers....great product and keep up the good work!

[josephking]

I have really specific timing for a fighting game that I loosely based on Street Fighter so converting everything to MS is kind of a pain. Can we get the option to switch back and forth between FPS and MS?