Not sure if asking for help, or asking for new feature...

[Marscaleb]

So I just today started working with Spriter. there's a few things that come to my mind right away, and I don't know if these are already options within the program, or if I ought to be posting these as suggestions to be implemented within the program.

First of all, I'd like to see some more guides in the editor. Specifically, I want to set up a guide for a hit-box for my character. While working on the animations, I want to have a good sense of exactly what point an enemy or a wall will hit him, so I can identify right here what animations are going to be clipping through walls, detecting false hits, etc, and make adjustments right here rather than after I've exported everything and set it up. So I'd like to be able to put up some guide-lines and/or guide-box so I can see what that area is.

I suppose I *could* drop in a box sprite at the back of my animation and simply remove it when I export, but that really seems unprofessional and awkward.

Secondary to that, I'm kind of unsure what sort of "scale" I'm looking at within the editor. Of course such things can be adjusted, but if I just drop a sprite into my scene, I'd like to have some clear idea of how big that will look once exported. A grid in the background would be nice; something I can adjust to fit whatever my end-goal is, like show what a 64x64 pixel square would be.

And as a third form of guide, I'd like to be able to set up a moving ground guide or a motion guide to help me make sure a moving animation looks right.

The way I imagine it working is I declare that I want one, and a checkerboard pattern appears in the background, (sized to match the grid or sized according to custom parameters) and then I tell it to move (for example) to the right at a speed of 640 pixels per second, or 10 (64^2 blocks) per second. (Or it could just be the same guide as I mentioned above, but now moving, and checkered.) At any given time index, the guide will have moved as far as it would in that timeframe. In the example given, the guide would look exactly the same at 0 seconds as at 1/5 of a second, and at 1/10 of a second the checkerboard pattern would be completely reversed.

This way I can make sure that my walking animation looks proper for a given speed. Ideally, a feature could be implemented where the editor can anchor a sprite to this guide, so I could set a foot down, declare it to anchor at that timeframe, and then as I advance the time I will see the foot get pushed back exactly equal to the speed of that guide, meaning if the character moves at that exact speed the foot will look like it remains on the ground.

It would be especially useful it I could adjust the guide to scale in individual axes or rotate it; then I could create animations for things like climbing stairs and slopes very easily.

Let's see, what else...

Is there a way to set an sprite to have its pivot point default to the exact center? Seriously, that should be default.

[Mike at BrashMonkey]

Great feedback Marscaleb ,

Most of what you mention is simply a matter of Spriter still being in beta and therefore missing a lot of the relatively simple features which will make workflow a lot more comfortable.

There will be features for setting up guide grids and background images.

Spriter will eventually indicate what level of zoom you are currently set to.

For now, you can select one image in the file palette, set its default pivot point to exact center with the center icon, then copt its default pivot, and then mutiselect all other image files, then click paste default pivot...its not automatic...but pretty fast. We'll considder adding a way to auto set all images pivotpoints...but this most likely wont show up until after the initial release of version 1.0

cheers,

Mike at BrashMonkey