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Update on Spriter API matters


lucid

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I just wanted to let everyone know my full focus has switched from developing Spriter (aside from critical fixes) to getting complete and thorough documentation for developers.  This will take some time, but this long overdue step is underway and I will update you when things are further along.  Thank you everyone for your extreme patience thus far on the matter. 

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Guest Dkiearth

actually that is a really good question.i got spriter spring of 2013 and kidna was waiting for that one, really hope for then to do both, cause we have started our project using the existing-incomplete one from bonus 2113, and we are kinda hopping for them to fininsh it or the new one to be compatible with the existing one.

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This is a tricky question that will require some research and perhaps discussion with the developer of Spriter2Unity.  Spriter2Unity is great because it converts Spriter animations directly into pure Unity2D animations while importing them...so they literally become standard Unity2d animations, which you can manipulate just like all other Unity2d animations.

However, while this is awesome, there may be no easy way to support all additional Spriter features such as sound effect triggering, collision boxes etc in the same manner...its possible a totally different Unity Spriter API would have to be created that might not convert the animations into native animations in order to facilitate supporting all of Spriter's features within Unity.

 

If this is all true, then both Spriter/Unity solutions would be separate, different, and offer different strengths vs draw-backs perhaps.

 

We cant say how long either updating Spriter2Unity or possibly creating a new non-native solution will take, especially because it depends on who we might be able to enlist the help of (seasoned Unity developers hopefully)..so if you need to start asap your best bet is to stick to Spriter2Unity and learn what features will likely not be supported any time soon and develop your animations without the use of those specific features.

 

Mind you, I'm the artist of BrashMonkey, not a programmer, and I've never done anything with Unity besides import 3d models I made for clients to test them in the engine. ;)

 

cheers,

Mike at BrashMonkey

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This is a tricky question that will require some research and perhaps discussion with the developer of Spriter2Unity.  Spriter2Unity is great because it converts Spriter animations directly into pure Unity2D animations while importing them...so they literally become standard Unity2d animations, which you can manipulate just like all other Unity2d animations.

However, while this is awesome, there may be no easy way to support all additional Spriter features such as sound effect triggering, collision boxes etc in the same manner...its possible a totally different Unity Spriter API would have to be created that might not convert the animations into native animations in order to facilitate supporting all of Spriter's features within Unity.

 

If this is all true, then both Spriter/Unity solutions would be separate, different, and offer different strengths vs draw-backs perhaps.

 

We cant say how long either updating Spriter2Unity or possibly creating a new non-native solution will take, especially because it depends on who we might be able to enlist the help of (seasoned Unity developers hopefully)..so if you need to start asap your best bet is to stick to Spriter2Unity and learn what features will likely not be supported any time soon and develop your animations without the use of those specific features.

 

Mind you, I'm the artist of BrashMonkey, not a programmer, and I've never done anything with Unity besides import 3d models I made for clients to test them in the engine. ;)

 

cheers,

Mike at BrashMonkey

To keep it sane, you shouldn't aim to have the sound effects and colisions suported yet, thats very unity specific, what you should do is make sure the animations themselves are fully supported.

You guys need to have 'export to unity' as a builtin option, this is going to be your biggest userbase if you do.

These are some good links for the devs to look into:

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/14024

http://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/series/bone-based-unity-2d-animation--cms-617

I believe the spriter2unity implementation uses something similar to the last 2 links. I've tested it, not thoroughly though, and it seems to work ok so far.

I was one of the early supporters of spriter but I'm a bit undecided at the moment, maybe I'll buy puppet2d and use that instead.

I hope you guys come around and realize how important unity really is and include all sorts of unity specific features into spriter.

Alternatively you guys could contact unity themselves, and hook something up. They'll help you out.

 

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I agree with Kiori. I personally do not care if the animations end up as pure Unity 2D animations or not, I just want them to play as they do in Spriter. I also don't think the sound triggers or collisions are a priority feature. Spriter is first and foremost an animation tool right? So the goal should be to get people's animations, as they see them in Spriter, working in Unity. All the other stuff is kind of a bonus.

 

Right now Spriter2Unity is lacking some core features, which means I would have to resort to exporting spritesheets from Spriter instead. This kind of defeats the purpose of modular animations. I also really want to be able to play around with bones in Unity, to do things like swapping a sprite (like a weapon), or forcing a character to look at something.

 

Good luck and keep us posted!

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I agree with Kiori. I personally do not care if the animations end up as pure Unity 2D animations or not, I just want them to play as they do in Spriter. I also don't think the sound triggers or collisions are a priority feature. Spriter is first and foremost an animation tool right? So the goal should be to get people's animations, as they see them in Spriter, working in Unity. All the other stuff is kind of a bonus.

 

Right now Spriter2Unity is lacking some core features, which means I would have to resort to exporting spritesheets from Spriter instead. This kind of defeats the purpose of modular animations. I also really want to be able to play around with bones in Unity, to do things like swapping a sprite (like a weapon), or forcing a character to look at something.

 

Good luck and keep us posted!

I looked into the Spine implementation, and they even have a spine to 2dToolkit runtime.(2DTK is the best framework for 2D in unity, its a must have)

It was done by a dev, through kickstarter, he even tweaked some of the Spine code, i believe to make it work more with unity.

The implementation is quite spectacular, you can do all sorts of in editor editing, switching, etc., and its very clean.

The difference though, is that spine can use meshes, while spriter uses sprites pretty much, and using meshes becomes an advantage in unity.

I actually have no idea how they integrated this stuff.

I'm pretty sure it would require some redesign if brashmonkey atempted to do the same. :/

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Guest Dkiearth

I agree with Kiori. I personally do not care if the animations end up as pure Unity 2D animations or not, I just want them to play as they do in Spriter. I also don't think the sound triggers or collisions are a priority feature. Spriter is first and foremost an animation tool right? So the goal should be to get people's animations, as they see them in Spriter, working in Unity. All the other stuff is kind of a bonus.

 

Right now Spriter2Unity is lacking some core features, which means I would have to resort to exporting spritesheets from Spriter instead. This kind of defeats the purpose of modular animations. I also really want to be able to play around with bones in Unity, to do things like swapping a sprite (like a weapon), or forcing a character to look at something.

 

Good luck and keep us posted!

Spriter2Unity kinda works for the animations, we started our project using spriter2unity and we had only minor throwbacks so far but we have manage to find a solutions for most of them and our project is a 2d side scroller that has characters and enemies that move in all 8 directions. My singature has one of the 2 skins that the player will be able to choose in the start of the game to have an idea of our project.

 

i don't know if that helps but the problems that we have encounter with spriter2Unity so far are...

1)if you split a character to 2 parts ( lower & upper) it kinda messes the z order in specific sprites when you put them together,

2) we tweak and edit the animation from spriter which we open from unity, everything works fine, just there is a chance that its going to detach the animations from the controller from the specific (Character) and you have to put them again manually when you click save on spriter.

3)if  you create a new animation on an entity on spriter and you have already put that animation it Unity it wont recognize or add the new animation in Unity, so you have to reimport it all and create a new prefab.

 

 

those are the most common issues that come to my mind and we encounter kinda often, other than that every animation translates great in unity using spriter2unity.

so i hope they will continue the work from bonues2113 and finish his already awesome work.

 

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  • 1 month later...

Hi everyone,

 

Right now Spriter2Unity is lacking some core features, which means I would have to resort to exporting spritesheets from Spriter instead. This kind of defeats the purpose of modular animations. I also really want to be able to play around with bones in Unity, to do things like swapping a sprite (like a weapon), or forcing a character to look at something.

 

 

Hi AniMittra,

 

I recommend you post a request for the missing features you need in the thread dedicated to Spriter2Unity if you've not already. This way its current developersd might get to them before we can. That said, I do know that swapping images with others is already possible once your Spriter animations are imported via Spriter2Unity, and on top of the possibilities of image-swapping,the tweening and massive memoy savings that modular animation offers is already a vast benefit over sprite-sheets. Though obviously we wont be happy until all Spriter Pro features are supported, especially in regards to the animations themselves.

 

 

I hope you guys come around and realize how important unity really is and include all sorts of unity specific features into spriter.

Alternatively you guys could contact unity themselves, and hook something up. They'll help you out.
 

 

Don't worry Kiori, we've always realized the popularity and importance of Unity and we've every intention of making sure its fully supported as quickly as we can, thats just not as fast as anyone would prefer, including ourselves. ;)  The first step in the direction of great and near universal Spriter support is the generic implimentation that Edgar (Spriter's programmer) is currently working on...after that we'll be in much better shape and focus to start nailing down these loose ends and getting Spriter nicely supported everywhere. 

 

Cheers,
Mike at BrashMonkey

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Sorry to revive an old thread but I felt this didn't need a new post. I was just checking to see if there's an ETA on when some updated documentation would be available? I've managed to parse SCML files and get all the data from it stored in data structures for my Game Maker Studio implementation I'm working on but I still don't understand how I'm supposed use the data to make the actual animations. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hi again AniMittra,

Can you specify which Spriter feature features you need supported as a priority. I'm nearly certian image swapping is already possible with a very small amount of code in Unity. Was there something else that's stopping you from using the current version of Spriter2Unity?

 

Thanks,
Mike at BrashMonkey

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Thanks for the reply.

 

When I tried using Spriter2Unity previously (admittedly months ago) I had some problems with it not displaying my animations correctly in the editor (but I think they were fine at runtime for the most part). This was a big problem because I wanted to animate certain props that will be used for level design. Say i have a bush with a "rustle" animation for when the player collides with it. The bush prefab created with Spriter2Unity would come in at a strange size in my unity Scene view (as if it wasn't using the first keyframe as the default sprite to display), but when I hit play it would suddenly be fine. This made it very difficult to accurately judge the size of the bush so I could place it in the scene for level design.

 

Another problem was Spriter2Unity sometimes wouldn't import new animations for prefabs, like if I added a "rustle2" animation to the bush and saved my Spriter project, sometimes the animation wouldn't come in to Unity unless I reimported the Spriter file. Sometimes it would, but sometimes I had to reimport the Spriter project, or delete the prefab altogether and then reimport. I can't risk this happening later in development and having to delete prefabs (I am using nested prefabs through a plugin). I really had no idea why it would work sometimes but not others. :???:

 

Also Spriter2Unity only supports pixels per unit of 100 IIRC, which meant I had to re-export my graphics for spriter at a new size so they would match up with my game which was using a different pixel per unit size. It'd be nice for Spriter2Unity to have a preferences file or import settings or something. Perhaps even individual settings on an entity basis.

 

Another minor problem was that on the first import Spriter2Unity would create the animation controller (e.g "bush.controller") but the actual animations weren't connected to the controller. The controller would create "states" (e.g. a state for "rustle" and another for "rustle2") for the animations (only on the first import), but the "motion" property for each state would be empty, and I'd have to manually link up the animations to each state in the controller. Then if I added a third animation (e.g. "rustle3"), Spriter2Unity would create the animation for it under the prefab, but it wouldn't create the state in the controller. This is minor because I think I could just drag the animation into the Animator window and it'll create a state for me but this seems like it should be an easy thing to automate anyways.

 

Most of the problems I had were usability related. I will try it again and see if my experience is better this time. I was also using a couple other plugins (prefab evolution and 2dtoolkit), so maybe it was just a compatibility issue on my end. I was not using 2dtoolkit with the spriter animations though, as I didn't know how to integrate them.

 

As far as features I need, image swapping was one of them. Getting custom ease curves working is pretty big too. Another is exposed bones so I can do things like targeting (rotation) to the cursor or another GameObject. If these are already possible I'd like to see an example or tutorial, as I didn't find one before. Boxes (for collision) and sounds and stuff are not as important, since I can handle all that stuff in Unity anyways. If they worked they could definitely speed up my pipeline and I would use them but it's not as crucial.

 

Overall though I just want an official, stable, intuitive plugin. I enjoy animating in Spriter but if I can't bring the animations over to the game without all these hiccups then it is a shame. Spriter is good software but the implementation support is definitely lacking in comparison to Spine. For me it is important to have a pipeline in place for funneling my art into a game, and a few months ago I did not feel confident in Spriter2Unity. I will try it again but I am still holding out for an official Unity implementation.  :)

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Hi again AniMittra,

 

I agree, testing the latest version and then reporting any remaining issues directly on Spriter2Unity's Github page is definitely an excellent first step into making sure Spriter is better supported ASAP. On our end, Edgar can't help directly with Unity support until after the generic implementation is finished.  We hope to make an update post about it's progress within the next week or two.

 

cheers,
Mike at BrashMonkey

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Hi again AniMittra,

 

I agree, testing the latest version and then reporting any remaining issues directly on Spriter2Unity's Github page is definitely an excellent first step into making sure Spriter is better supported ASAP. On our end, Edgar can't help directly with Unity support until after the generic implementation is finished.  We hope to make an update post about it's progress within the next week or two.

 

cheers,

Mike at BrashMonkey

Thank you for that! I've been waiting on any kind of sign of progress and this is something.

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