Bad first experience.

[Drew]

I bought Spriter Pro a few days ago after trying the free version. It seemed to work fine with the demo files. However, my first attempt at an animation has been an utter failure...and for all the wrong reasons.

I realize it's beta, but I can't even use it. I must be doing something wrong.

Here are the issues I've run into so far. I can't even complete my first animation.

1. I created some pixel art in photoshop and saved each body part to a separate file. I don't know any easier way to do this. I found some scripts that were supposed to help with PSD files into Spriter, but they did not work. So, I had to save 20 images (left leg, right foot, etc.) and then drag them out one at a time in Spriter.

2. To makes things worse, the image was extremely blurry when zoomed, so it was impossible for me to align anything. Any zoom at all produces extreme blurriness. Photoshop on the other hand can zoom and retain the pixels so I can see what I'm doing. So, I don't know what the issue is. Maybe it's anti-aliasing? If I can't see each pixel with hard edges, I can't line up the art assets. The image was small, maybe 100 pixels tall. That's how pixel art is supposed to be. If it gets much larger, we start dealing with more pixels and it looks different. I was going to resize the image in Construct 2, which I've done before and it works fine.

3. It was extremely hard to assign bones. Maybe the hit box on the bones is too big, but I could not for the life of me click a bone, hold B, and assign an object to it. It would not click anything. I had to do a lengthy walkaround. I had to lock the bone, drag the object away, unlock the bone, click the bone, hold B, click the object, lock the bone again, drag the object back where it should be, and unlock the bone again. Add my number 2 point above to this, and it gets very frustrating. If I had just been allowed to click a bone, hold B, and click an object from the menu, all of this would have been solved...

4. Maybe I am just not very good at the program, but I had trouble getting the program to behave. I would make sure there are no key frames or whatever they are called, go back to the first point, and delete a bone to try something different. Like say to delete a foot bone and use the lower leg bone to control the foot. Well, I did that and it kept not wanting to keep it assigned. The foot would go back to not being assigned to the lower leg bone. I don't know why it's so picky. I deleted everything in the animation window at the bottom, and tried again with no success. Maybe there is something I'm not doing.

5. Then, I duplicated the animation. I then tried tried to delete the first animation, but it wouldn't let me. I could rename the first animation, but not delete it. I have no idea why.

6. Okay, so I manage to create a very crude animation. For the reasons above, I did not try to get fancy. I just wanted to import it into Construct 2 and test it. Well, it didn't work. I have imported the demo guy into Construct 2, so I know I can do it. But I imported "my" animation into Construct 2, and it looks okay. I set the starting animation to "idle." I run the test to see what it looks like. Well, it plays an animation that doesn't exist. The guy's foot rotates and flies away while getting bigger and distorted. I thought, okay I messed up something in Spriter. So, I go back to Spriter, and that animation does not exist. I can not play it back or see it. My real "idle" animation just had a little movement in it. This was something, I don't know what. I tried saving and bringing it back into Construct 2 clean, but it did the same thing...

So, that's it for tonight. I am worn out from trying to get it to work. I don't even know if I'm just doing it wrong, or if it just isn't working right.

[Mike at BrashMonkey]

Hi Drew,

Sorry you are having a rough time with Spriter. Thanks for the feedback, and for making it concise and numbered. This makes it really easy to address the issues one at a time and make sure I don't miss anything. But before I address the specific issues, I'd like to point out a few things.

Please do keep in mind, Spriter is still in beta, there are still bugs that will appear as we coninue to add the remaining features we have planned. We fix them as soon as possible once they are discovered by us or the community, but there's bound to be the occasional one they you will run into before its reported and/or fixed...this is why we offer the eartly adopter sale discount.

This is even more true with the Construct2 plug-in...its not done, doens't support all of Spriters features and is is bound to still have bugs.

The free version of Spriter is there so people can make sure it Spriter will satisfy their specific needs. Potential paying customers can take all the time they need to test it out with the free version, and only buy the Pro version if not only the free version meets their specific needs and expectations, and if they want to further support its development and take advantage of the pro features.

Now for your specific issues:

1. I created some pixel art in photoshop and saved each body part to a separate file. I don't know any easier way to do this. I found some scripts that were supposed to help with PSD files into Spriter, but they did not work. So, I had to save 20 images (left leg, right foot, etc.) and then drag them out one at a time in Spriter.

The key word here is pixel-art... While we plan on implimenting a specific pixel-art friendly mode some time after the initial release of Spriter 1.0, we canit guarantee how soon that will happen. So, for now, the smaller resolution the images you use, the tougher it will be to work with them. (The mixel art friendly mode will rectify all of these issues.) As for the script, I can't say why they didn't work for you, but we didn't make them and I suggest you contact the people who did and help troubleshoot what the issue is. Another important point, I've never used a script to quickly export all the body part images etc and get them into Spriter. I alays have done so manually, for the Art Packs and for my professional work for clients. While it is no the fun or fast part of animating, the overall animating process is still drastically faster..especially once you finish this initial set-up task.

2. To makes things worse, the image was extremely blurry when zoomed, so it was impossible for me to align anything. Any zoom at all produces extreme blurriness. Photoshop on the other hand can zoom and retain the pixels so I can see what I'm doing. So, I don't know what the issue is. Maybe it's anti-aliasing? If I can't see each pixel with hard edges, I can't line up the art assets. The image was small, maybe 100 pixels tall. That's how pixel art is supposed to be. If it gets much larger, we start dealing with more pixels and it looks different. I was going to resize the image in Construct 2, which I've done before and it works fine.

Right, this again goes to the pixel art issue.. the smaller and lower-res you work, the more this will be an issue...this will be a non-issue once the pixel art friendly mode is introduced into Spriter. I'm a pixel artist myself, I love low-res low-color pixel art and making it... Spriter is NOT yet a comfortable tool for working with low-res pixel art. It will be, but we really can't say how soon.

3. It was extremely hard to assign bones. Maybe the hit box on the bones is too big, but I could not for the life of me click a bone, hold B, and assign an object to it. It would not click anything. I had to do a lengthy walkaround. I had to lock the bone, drag the object away, unlock the bone, click the bone, hold B, click the object, lock the bone again, drag the object back where it should be, and unlock the bone again. Add my number 2 point above to this, and it gets very frustrating. If I had just been allowed to click a bone, hold B, and click an object from the menu, all of this would have been solved...

I think this issue as well is due to the resolution you're working at more than anything else. However, in an upcoming build of Spriter, the click detection for bones is no longer based on a box, but on the sctual shape of the bones...which will help in these situations as well. You're suggesting for an easy solution (being able to click the sprites to assign in the x-order palette instead of just in the canvas) is spot on. I'll make sure Edgar hears about this iand its highly likely this will appear in a build before 1.0 is released.

4. Maybe I am just not very good at the program, but I had trouble getting the program to behave. I would make sure there are no key frames or whatever they are called, go back to the first point, and delete a bone to try something different. Like say to delete a foot bone and use the lower leg bone to control the foot. Well, I did that and it kept not wanting to keep it assigned. The foot would go back to not being assigned to the lower leg bone. I don't know why it's so picky. I deleted everything in the animation window at the bottom, and tried again with no success. Maybe there is something I'm not doing.

It's definaly more that Spriter is NOT currently easy to use to do what you need to do..IE, work with very low-res images. We'll fix this as soon as we can, but Edgar's plate is very full atm. about the bone isses, I'm really not sure what you mean. Did you know each keyframe has seperate data for what is keyed to what bone etc...this is so you can dynamically change bone structure, z-orders etc etc at any point in the animation. perhaps you ran into an actual bug here, but I can't tell without more info.

5. Then, I duplicated the animation. I then tried tried to delete the first animation, but it wouldn't let me. I could rename the first animation, but not delete it. I have no idea why.

This is a known bug and will be fixed as soon as Edgar can get to it.

6. Okay, so I manage to create a very crude animation. For the reasons above, I did not try to get fancy. I just wanted to import it into Construct 2 and test it. Well, it didn't work. I have imported the demo guy into Construct 2, so I know I can do it. But I imported "my" animation into Construct 2, and it looks okay. I set the starting animation to "idle." I run the test to see what it looks like. Well, it plays an animation that doesn't exist. The guy's foot rotates and flies away while getting bigger and distorted. I thought, okay I messed up something in Spriter. So, I go back to Spriter, and that animation does not exist. I can not play it back or see it. My real "idle" animation just had a little movement in it. This was something, I don't know what. I tried saving and bringing it back into Construct 2 clean, but it did the same thing...

If the animation looks one way in Spriter and different in C2, this is almost certianly a bug in the C2 plug-in. Please email Edgar your file and when he can, he'll find the issue and fix the plug-in. his direct email address is lucid@brashmonkey.com

Again, really sorry your first attempt to make actual work with Spriter was so difficult. I hope I adequately explained why and hope we can address these issues within the next several Spriter (and C2 plug-in) updates.

cheers,

Mike at BrashMonkey

[Drew]

Thanks for the quick reply. I hope Spriter gets support for pixel art soon. I was hoping to get my first game out within the next 4 to 5 months.

Also, I should mention that I the characters I make for this game will all be using swords and whatnot, so I hope you get it set up so we can adjust the hit box on the characters. That way I can set the hit box to be on the "sword" itself and make it more realistic during attack animations.

I'll go ahead and send that guy a copy of the files.

To further expand on point 4, I was trying to play with the anchor command. I was locking the feet down so I could make the body move up and down a little bit just for an idle animation. However, it was not producing good results. The feet kept pointing in awkward directions. I needed them to be perfectly straight, because you know he is on the ground, and they shouldn't be able to move. So, I tried removing the foot bone and using the bone from the lower leg to control the feet to see if it would product better results. It still wasn't the best. But then the issue I was having was that the feet did not want to be assigned to the leg bone. I deleted every frame in the animation, and I kept having to reassign them. I just wanted them to always be assigned. So, I would click on the timeline to create a new frame for the animation, and the bones would not be assigned anymore. It could be just me not knowing what I'm doing.

While playing with it, I actually got the best result when the feet were not assigned to anything. They did not move when I made the guy crouch.

After playing with it some more today, I found the best way was to put the feet bones back in, and simply turn off the rotation on the feet bones, then anchor the lower leg bones. This let me crouch while keeping the feet firmly planted, so I guess that's the best solution for now.

Anyway, in the meantime, I'm not sure what I should do. If I'm better off waiting for better pixel art support, then I don't want to pull my hair out trying to force it. I guess I can work on level design or something. I could also do my original plan which was to animate the characters by hand in Photoshop. The animations would only have a couple frames each though, which is why I bought Spriter. But I don't know. I guess it depends on how many months it takes to get the Spriter/C2 updates.

[tombmonkey]

Is there any particular reason your game HAS to be pixel art?

There are infinite amount of styles you can resort to that are not pixel art.

I often like to look at either flash games or cellphone games for inspiration on economic styles, normally, it's better to adapt the style to what you can do, instead of being limited by what you can't.

[Drew]

Hmm, I don't know. I've never been a fan of vector art. It just looks too cartoony. This game is going to have a semi-realistic look sort of like a typical Castevania game or something.

The backgrounds will all be hand drawn pixel art in Photoshop. I didn't want the main characters to stand out as being "different." I'm trying to give this game a retro look.

I don't think I have any programs that would be able to create vector art anyway. I don't really know of any other way to do it other than vector or pixel.

[Mike at BrashMonkey]

Hey Drew,

One feature thats highly likely to come soon after this b6 release is the ability to export a scaled version of an entire project (including the image files used). What you could do is create all image files and the animations at 2x the final size needed, and then reduce the entire project when you are ready to use it in the game.

This would alow you to work much easier in Spriter, work faster and sloppier on the image files (because reduction automatically cleans up imperfections), and means you'd have 2x or 4x versions of all art/animations to use for marketting graphics, Flash banners etc.

This might be your best solution ATM, to hold you over until the Pixel art friendly mode is availible.

cheers,

Mike at BrashMonkey

[Drew]

That sounds interesting. Thanks for the heads up.

What I'm probably going to do for now is just animate by hand in photoshop. There won't be many frames anyway. I'm going to put this off and work on building the levels in case anything changes my mind. Most of the attacks are going to be fast sword attacks and whatnot anyway, so I have to draw at least a few different poses anyway.