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I'm down for more features in Spriter, but right now it doesn't work at all in Unity


Jonjon

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It would be nice to actually finish a program that actually works with transferring animation data to Unity besides just sprite sheets, without all of these errors. I don't see a point in spending all this time working on more features within Spriter when the only place we can actually use them is in Spriter. I've had this program for a whole year and have been unable to properly transfer this stuff to Unity or any other program unless I only did Sprite Sheets. Yea, the plugin KIND of transfers animation data, but it gives me tons of errors, gets shit wrong, and it's basically impossible to work with. The latest update to the plugin, and the old one I have, do not work with Unity 5 at all right now. It keeps giving me this error called "Unknown character n" or something and doesn't attempt to make a prefab, not even a broken one, just nothing happens.

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1. Please watch your language.

2. It's been stated repeatedly over the past few months that Edgar is not adding any more features to Spriter until the official reference implementation is finished.

3. The Unity importer is not an official implementation made by the BrashMonkey team, so there's no point in complaining about it to them.

4. There is a specific thread about the Unity importer where you can post bug reports and ask questions about usage (hopefully with a bit more respect and tact).

 

Thanks for using Spriter and being part of the community.

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Hi Jonjon,
 
We agree about Spriter support in general being the top priority, and as RunnerPack mentioned, this has been our focus for the past several months. Instead on focusing on Spriter support  for any specific authoring system (and showing "unfair" favoritism ), our first logical step is a fully featured "generic" Spriter implementation which is as powerful and flexible as possible, and also being carefully constructed so the addition of known future features will be as painless as possible, without the need of drastic re-writes and re-porting the implementation once the new features are added. This is indeed taking longer than we would like, but we're working on it as diligently as possible and apologize humbly for the long wait. I also completely sympathize with your frustration and patience wearing thin.
 
As for Spriter2Unity specifically, reporting the errors you're facing as clearly as possible in the appropriate thread, and to the attention of the actual developers would likely be much more fruitful.  I suggest you first, make sure you're using the latest of everything (Spriter, Spriter2Unity, and Unity). Then get your error list, and report everything as clearly as possible. It's also very important to know that Spriter2Unity does not yet support several of the more advanced Spriter features, so learning what it does not support and learning to at least for now create your animation while avoiding the unsupported features will allow you to work without issues.

Starting a thread specifically to list the known unsupported features would be useful to everyone and might even help encourage current and future developers to get those features supported all the sooner.

That all aside, once our generic reference implementation is finished, our next focus will be on helping with specific implementations, and the order in which we'll be able to help ensure full support for any particular authoring system will depend predominantly on two factors: a) the level of collaboration from the developers/community of each given authoring system and    b ) The general popularity of that particular authoring system.
 
Long story short, Edgar is focusing his full time and attention (as much as possible) to creating the best, most flexible, thorough, and future proof Spriter implementation which should make porting full Spriter support to any authoring system fast and painless once its finished, and, as soon as it is finished well focus as much of our time and resources as we can to helping to port this new, full implementation to as many authoring systems as possible, including of course Unity, which is both very popular and has a great community who have continually donated their valuable time and expertise to supporting Spriter.
 
Cheers.
-Mike at BrashMonkey

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Mike that was a very customer centric response. 

 

 We are all adults spending valuable time and money on these products and when we have a problem and are extremely agitated, the first thing that comes out your mouth shouldn't be about my MANNERS.

 

  RunnerPack, loose the high and mighty attitude.  :ugeek:

 

That's a consumer, that could just as easily just be done with this product and go to the several other competitors that may not have this particular issue.

He has been facing this issue for an entire YEAR and has finally voiced an opinion.  

 

I was so happy to see Mike come in with an appropriate response. 

 

It's EMPATHY, please take the time to LEARN that word, Mr. runnerpack        :-|

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Thanks for the PM Mike, I didn't even check the thread after I made it until just now when I saw that email notification ;p.

Anyways thanks for letting me know you guys are currently working on an official pipeline for Unity.

Yes I will make sure everything is updated to the latest and try again.

For now I'm having someone use sprite sheets in UE4 and another guy work on a 3D game in Unity, but I am very much still looking forward to using the bone animation from Spriter. I bought some mesh-animating plugin to use inside Unity last year too, but I didn't like it, couldn't even figure out how to use it for some reason, but making animations inside Spriter has always been easy and that's why I stuck with it up until now. That's why I'm just waiting for this program to work properly in transferring all the bone animation before trying to make another 2D bone animated game.

So right now, the one that my freelancer is making in UE4 is actually almost done and I can't wait to show it to you. So as I might have mentioned, I bought all the art packs last year, and now I put like 90% of the enemies from all the packs in this game. I don't want to spoil too much, but it is FUN AS HELL to play, and looks amazing. I cannot thank my programmer enough, he has done a tremendous job implementing all my ideas, as well as his own. He actually made certain properties you wouldn't get out of sprite sheets to work with the sprite sheets (skin swapping for one). I highly recommend him to help you part time in finishing the code, he's definitely a genius. He said since it supports json, it will be easy for him to develop something for UE4, and perhaps with more help he can get something going with Unity as well. We'll see, that's another story.

Anyways, so I was wondering, you said everything is royalty free right and we can use the stuff in our own games for commercial purposes, as long as we don't directly sell content from the art packs themselves? I just want to make absolutely sure I am doing this legally before we release the game, we basically used all the original artwork from the packs, and I made custom animations, besides that nothing was changed. I swapped some armor between the different packs, but that was it. So it's cool if we put it up on the Android and other stores with in-game ads and stuff?

Also, do you have an image or animation you would like us to insert in the game before it hits the main menu, to show your brand, so people know we used Spriter to make this game? You know like before a Final Fantasy game starts, it shows "Squaresoft" and whatever other companies they used to help make it. If you have something like that you'd like us to put in, I'd be more than happy to do that

That's basically why I stuck with Spriter for so long. I already invested my time and money into it, I love the art style, and I knew I could make it work if I just added a few more animations, I saw so much potential with this software and the premade art packs. Tthen once our game gets popular enough and I make some cash, maybe I can get more free time to make my own art using Spriter again to animate it, and maybe by then take advantage of the 2D bone system, we'll see. I just needed a way to get the animations into the game engine first, and without taking up too much space with all the dozens of sheets. Now that I hired the right guy, we're finally about to push our first Spriter-based game out there.

So I want to thank you for what you've given us so far, especially with that new feature that allows me to export every animation a character has into custom sized sprite sheets at once. It was a long road, lots of frustration trying to get it to work in Unity, but for now I found a genius that got the sprite sheets to work like bone animation in Unreal, and by next week all of our hard work and time and money spent will finally pay off =]. I'll post a thread again once it comes out.

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Hi Jonjon,

To clarify, we're not directly or officially working on a first party, official BrashMonkey implementation of any specific engine.. What were doing is first finishing a fully featured reference implementation in C++ which should make porting Spriter support to any specific authoring system very quick and straightforward for any programmer experienced with that specific authoring system's development system.  Then, once that's finished, we'll be collaborating with the most qualified developers for each authoring system we can find to make sure an open source full Spriter implementation for each authoring system is created and available to everyone as quickly as possible. This will be the focus of our time and resources as much as possible until Spriter support is as universal as possible.

Once you've updated everything, if there are still issues, please do email me (mike@brashMonkey.com) your Spriter project and I'll see if I can help trouble-shoot which features you're using which aren't currently supported..we can then report them to the current Spriter2Unity developer(s) and hopefully even help get that/those features supported.

We'll definitely be interested in contacting skilled programmers, especially with strong experience with specific authoring systems like UE4, so by all means, if you'd like to introduce us that would be highly appreciated. Also, I really look forward to seeing your game.

Yes, if you bought Spriter Pro, then everything in the Essentials Packs is free for you to use on all of your games... no need to credit us, no need to change the art etc. The only limit is you can't give the art packs to other people making other games (non transferable in other words) and you can't resell or give away any portion or all of the art packs to other people to use as art. (edited or otherwise) without our written approval.  The same exact thing goes for the full versions of the Art Packs, if you purchased those.

It's very nice of you to offer to display our logo at the start up of your game, but that's not necessary at all, in fact, it might cause confusion or the perception that we had an active role in the production of your game etc. Instead, if you feel like it, fell free to just add BrashMonkey.com to the games credits somewhere under art or animating... but only if you want to.

 

It sounds like you have some awesome projects well underway.  I wish you the best of luck with them and definitely want to make sure Spriter is as useful a part of your pipe-line as possible, as soon as possible. Thanks again so much for your patience and support.

Cheers.
-Mike at BrashMonkey





 

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