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Spriter for Construct 2 and a quick status update (1-30-14)


lucid

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Hi everyone,

Edgar here, first with news about new tutorial videos and (still in the works) Spriter file support for a fantastic 2d game authoring system called Construct2 by Scirra, and secondly with a long overdue status update on the still in progress next build of Spriter...but I'll get back to that shortly.

For those who have not yet heard of it but are interested in authoring 2d games, it's well worth visiting scirra.com and giving Construct2 a try.

Here is their promo video:

It's among the fastest, easiest and most flexible authoring systems we've found and in fact we used Construct2 to create the preview pages for our ArtPacks.

Thanks to the direct involvement and help of Construct2's creator, the Spriter plug-in is progressing nicely and already offering Construct2 users many advantages over traditional, frame by frame animated sprites.

Mike has created a series of tutorial videos , the latest of which is embedded below, which show exactly how to import, control and update Spriter files in Construct2:

And here are links to other related videos:

Don't forget to download and install the actual Spriter plug-in for C2 from here before you get started.

Significant progress has also been made toward the next big update for the plugin, so stay tuned.

Status update for Spriter

Now, about Spriter itself and the status on the latest build, we'd like to again express our deepest gratitude for your patience and support during the delay. Although partly explained by the holidays, a couple of family related diversions, and a hard-drive failure, the bulk of the delay between our last release (b6.1) and the coming one boils down to the following: Though B6 introduced the last remaining of what I would call the “more complicated” features planned for the initial release of Spriter 1.0, most of the features that I am now adding or will need to add would benefit from a more powerful timeline widget.

The suggestions and bug reports threads had a large share of posts dedicated to the timeline, and when implementing the new variable and tag features it became obvious that the time to overhaul the timeline was now - so that 1.0 would include a much more solid and flexible timeline, along with the last of the 1.0 featureset.

The new timeline should offer increased performance, and the ability for me to enhance and extend much more easily. For instance, a side effect of these enhancements was the ability for me to easily enable the often requested framerate snapping:

5bb477f4edc6400007b0f4bb369121f4_large.PNG?1391121104

Unfortunately, due to the nature of programming such an integral part of Spriter we still cant say exactly when this new build will be ready, but promise we're working long, hard, and smart on getting it done as soon as we can. In the meantime, in the interest of transparency and more frequent updates along the way, here's what's currently working so far, and what's left to do:

The new hierarchical ui which allows for expanding 'sub-timeline's is fully functional, along with a completely rebuilt subsystem for handling the display of keys and reponding to user actions on the timeline. This includes a new method of applying undos and redos that feels much more responsive. The variable and tagging systems are also fully functional with auto-completion to easily find/add tags and variables, and the ability to easily edit multiple variables and tags, and key/unkey them in a single interface.

What's left to do for the upcoming build is tying up several loose ends with the new timeline system, and reenable behaviors that already existed in previous versions, such as making selection of a main key automatically select subkeys, highlighting selected timelines, etc. In addition to this, due to the size of the changes under the hood, we will spend some time testing, and tightening up everything before release.

thanks everyone.

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Sounds great! It's nice to see a more traditional dopesheet-style view for keyframes. I wonder what the chances of getting a more standard curve editor would be?

Something along the lines of:

09fig39.jpg

It can be a bit difficult with the current method to really visualize how the curves set up on each keyframe blend with each other.

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