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Spriter all jacked up, again.


MasterZenith

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I have to calm myself down before posting because I post these bug issues right after a bug happens.

This is the third time this massive program breaking issue has occurred. In the previous thread where this happened I was asked if I could record it. Um, how can I record something that I don't know if its going to happen? Not to sound rude, but I'm not going to record everything I do for weeks to catch a bug.

If I knew how to reproduce the bug, then yes, i would record it, but I have no clue what is going on to reproduce the bug intentionally.

1) All the key frames just vanish and there is only a single key frame. I have found out that to make the hidden key frames appear, you have to physically move the one key frame that is visible.

 

2) All the animations are screwed up. Half the doll's bones are locked in place and don't move while others move just fine. Essentially, the animation is ruined. undoing history does nothing to fix this as screwed up aspects of the bug time travel and effect everything done so far.

3) Autosave then fucks me over by autosaving what is currently going on. Now, I have autosave turned on for every minute to avoid issues like this, but ironically, because of auto save I lose everything I have ever done for this particular animation.

 

4) Then, Spriter locks up, turns white, and crashes.

So hours of work gone. The only way to really combat this is the manually save every few minutes, but that is terrible. I don't have to manually autosave to make sure autosave itself doesn't screw me over.

I don't know how to reproduce this bug, but it is a bug large enough where I am almost afraid of using spriter anymore. I'm looking for more stable sprite animators out there at the moment because I use animators to make commercial games, and I don't have time to putz around with issues like this.

 

If I could record it to show it to whoever this matters to, I would, but I can't, sorry!

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Spriter JUST did the same thing again.... Seriously....

This time I felt it was going to happen.

As I was animating, I realized that the leg of my character wasn't animating properly. it lost its movement at some points. I kind of felt what was going to happen.

I went back into history to see where the mistake I made was, but no point was the leg animation fixed. At some point all the key frames vanished. I grabbed the one visible keyframe, and moved it to make the other key frames visible, and behold, all the animations were messed up. Then, spriter turned white, locked up and crashed. More work gone.

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HI. 

 

What you should do to have less problems is animate bones first. and when animation is done paste images on frame zero and link to bones on frame zero. This way you should have about 80% less problems.

 

What you have is possibly an incompatibility of some kind as my computer which is 8 years old, 3gb ram with an Nvida geforce 8600m works well (with the ocassional crash).

 

The majority of problems have to do with pasting images or bones in the wrong place, if you paste something and gets screwed up, copy it, delete from all frames (the forbidden icon),  go to frame zero and paste to all keys. Its not a lot of work and works well for me.

 

Cheers.

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Hi MasterZenith,

 

I'm very sorry to hear your running into such severe issues while using Spriter.

 

1) I've never seen this happen, nor have there been other reports of this bug in the past (to my knowledge), so we appreciate your patience as we figure out the cause.. until we figure out the specific situation that causes it, or are able to reproduce the issue ourselves, it will be nearly impossible to fix. Would you be willing to send your Spriter project to us? There might be a clue in there, or maybe we can reproduce the bug when working with the same files as you. If so, please zip up the entire folder with all images and the scml file and email it to mike@brashmonkey.com

 

2) This seems highly or completely related to bug 1.  Unless you accidentally right click on the canvas at some point and locked the bones, or turned on IK locking on those particular bones and didn't realize it.  Again, seeing your Spriter project might help us solve both of these problems.

 

3) Autosave should NOT save over your original file, it saves a copy of your file, with "auto" added to the name, so it should never threaten or cause damage to your actual working copy. If it's somehow saving over your original that's a major bug and should be fixed.  Also, whenever doing productive work like the creation of code, art, animations, music etc, you should always manually back up to a totally new file name, for example including the date to guarantee you cant loose a lot of work.  I highly recommend you use a dropbox account to save to, because this has automatic version control in it... you can recover previous saved versions going back to the first time you added the file to dropbox. This is not just advice for Spriter work, but for any projects/data types.

 

4) This is really sounding like your scml file somehow got corrupted... seeing your file might help solve all this quickly.

 

Again, please explain how autosave screwed you over. It does not save over your working file, it just makes a back up in case there's a crash or power outage. If Spriter is saving over your actual working file, please report this asap.

 

I sympathize greatly for the loss of work. I've been there... years ago, repeatedly, from all kinds of productivity software.. there's always the chanch you'll encounter bugs, power outages, corrupted files/hard drives, or user error.. for these reasons, I DID in fact develop the habit of saving to a new back up every few minutes... and its saved me from ever having lost hours of work ever again... its typically a few key-presses while I'm thinking or taking a sip of water.. however, opening a Dropbox account and saving to that is even better.

 

Please keep in mind, Spriter is being used by thousands of people, every day..including myself, hours a day, (to create entire new Art Packs and test features).. It's the nature of cross platform development that some people, depending on hardware, OS set up, workflow habits, and feature use are going to run into problems that the rest of us have never seen and likely will never see, and we work very hard to fix these problems and help our customers (and free users) as thoroughly and quickly as we can.

Please do consider sending us your Spriter project, as this is the best chance of us finding the cause of the issue, (aside from your continued use, and remembering what you just did before a crash, then reload and redo the same thing while recording.. This seems highly likely to capture your crash on video, no?)

 

Again, I'm very sorry for the frustration, inconvenience and loss of time, and hope we can help find the cause of these issues and make Spriter more stable for everyone. Even though issues like this only appear rarely, and to a very small percent of users, we absolutely hate when users have a bad experience with Spriter and are determined to fix the issue whenever possible, and as quickly as possible.

 

cheers.

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Hi again,

 

Spriter user Loudo found a way to reproduce a bug that causes frames to disappear!  There's high likelihood this is whats happening to you.  Are you multi-selecting key frames and dragging them to move them?  Apparently this causes the sort of disappearing frame thing you are experiencing.

 

http://brashmonkey.com/forum/index.php?/topic/4010-spriter-r4-bug-thread/page-3

 

cheers.

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1) This is a little off topic, but maybe I am a fool, and using autosave wrong?

I have the file name, Troll. I load Troll and begin to work. Autosave does it's thing and autosaves every minute. The crash happens. Now I am stuck with two files - Troll, which has data from two hours ago when I started the project, and autosave, which has the messed up data. So either way, I am stuck with work 2 hours old or corrupted work.

So, I choose to load autosave because I can work with the problems and fix things, but now, the file name is autosave, and if I manually save, spriter is saving to autosave, not troll. 

So to avoid this problem, it feels like I have to manually save with control+S every few minutes so I get a current save on Troll as well as autosave, but then that defeats the purpose of autosave I think?

I'm sorry if I am doing something wrong on my end.

2) As for selecting multiple keys and dragging them around, I don't recall doing that, but I will be more observant to this in case this bug happens again.

 

3) Animating bones THEN adding images to the bones seems wrong to me. I don't know what the image is looking like if all I am doing is animating bones. I'm not a pro animator, so I can't 'wing it" and know what I'm doing by animating a complicated scene THEN adding images to it afterwards. I'm not at that level yet, so this is not an option! I need to see how the arm looks during animation to see if it is animating properly.

Thank you gentlemen for your patience with me and my issues.

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You can animate images only if you want, but in the long road you have many advantages on using bones for animation. For example:

 

-You can replace a linked image to a bone, with a new one conserving the animation with just one operation.

 

-You can decide if deforming a limb by an image or bone or both.

 

-You can use IK (Spriter pro) on bones and that is powerful.

 

And many, many advantages. In all cases, you can start animating images and when you need it start animating bones.

 

Cheers.

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Hi again MasterZenith

 

1) Autosave is to make sure you don't loose hours of work if Spriter crashes or the computer uses power.. of course its useless if the data(animations) gets corrupted without you noticing, and then it saves a "corrupted" file..that's a very special case, and autosave cant do anything about that. This is why manual back up saving whenever you make good progress and you know for sure you want to protect your work so far... and again, its a really good idea to back up manually at least every day before you start working.  This is why I highly recommend drop box, as it's "version controlled"..meaning you can log in and retrieve all the previously saved versions. https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/11

You should NOT save manually every 2 minutes without thoroughly making sure the animation(s) you've been working on is definitely in good shape.. play it before saving. 

 

My workflow:

a) The start of a new day. Make a quick, dated backup of my spriter file I'll be working with. (TrollApril282015.scml) BUT I DON'T USE THIS, its a back-up!

b) I load the normal working file into Spriter (Troll.scml) and Leave autosave on in case I loose power or Spriter crashes.

c) Every time I make really good progress I replay the animation and look carefully to make sure its awesome. I do this for any animation I've edited.

d) I save manually. (Troll.scml)
e) All the while, my files are in a drop box folder, so I can retrieve all the saved versions of the auto-back-ups or the manual saves from dropbox whenever I want. INCLUDING the ones that got saved over. That's the power of "version control"

 

3) I completely agree. I would not want to work with only bones, nor should anyone have to,  Lets figure out any bugs and fix them asap! :)

 

Thank you too for your patience, and I really do sympathize with the frustration.  Having Spriter perform poorly for anyone really makes us feel crappy, and we won't stand for it if we can help it.

 

Cheers.

-Mike at BrashMonkey

 

1) This is a little off topic, but maybe I am a fool, and using autosave wrong?

I have the file name, Troll. I load Troll and begin to work. Autosave does it's thing and autosaves every minute. The crash happens. Now I am stuck with two files - Troll, which has data from two hours ago when I started the project, and autosave, which has the messed up data. So either way, I am stuck with work 2 hours old or corrupted work.

So, I choose to load autosave because I can work with the problems and fix things, but now, the file name is autosave, and if I manually save, spriter is saving to autosave, not troll. 

So to avoid this problem, it feels like I have to manually save with control+S every few minutes so I get a current save on Troll as well as autosave, but then that defeats the purpose of autosave I think?

I'm sorry if I am doing something wrong on my end.

2) As for selecting multiple keys and dragging them around, I don't recall doing that, but I will be more observant to this in case this bug happens again.

 

3) Animating bones THEN adding images to the bones seems wrong to me. I don't know what the image is looking like if all I am doing is animating bones. I'm not a pro animator, so I can't 'wing it" and know what I'm doing by animating a complicated scene THEN adding images to it afterwards. I'm not at that level yet, so this is not an option! I need to see how the arm looks during animation to see if it is animating properly.

Thank you gentlemen for your patience with me and my issues.

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He meant he does not want to animate with ONLY BONES, meaning without being able to see the images first.  if you re-read what he was replying to, you'll see what he meant.  It was suggested to him that he set up a key with only the skeleton, then do the entire animation with ONLY bones, and THEN add the images to the bones ones the animation is totally finished.

 

cheers.

-Mike at BrashMonkey

 

You can animate images only if you want, but in the long road you have many advantages on using bones for animation. For example:

 

-You can replace a linked image to a bone, with a new one conserving the animation with just one operation.

 

-You can decide if deforming a limb by an image or bone or both.

 

-You can use IK (Spriter pro) on bones and that is powerful.

 

And many, many advantages. In all cases, you can start animating images and when you need it start animating bones.

 

Cheers.

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He meant he does not want to animate with ONLY BONES, meaning without being able to see the images first.  if you re-read what he was replying to, you'll see what he meant.  It was suggested to him that he set up a key with only the skeleton, then do the entire animation with ONLY bones, and THEN add the images to the bones ones the animation is totally finished.

 

cheers.

-Mike at BrashMonkey

 

Yes I was the one who suggested it  :oops:

 

OK. So I was trying to help. No problem. Sorry :D

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On a side note, and completely off topic, I don't use Drop box due to their ideological affiliations. I don't need a company telling me I can't use their service because my files may contain words they don't like.

And on a side note, I don't trust cloud computing much at all due to the complete lack pf privacy and data mining those companies do to my files on their servers, but thank you for the advice.

:P

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I save after every keyframe i make , never had keyframes disappearing , we dont know your workflow but most of us didnt had your problems so there might be something youre doing wrong.Maybe try all the stuff you do while creating and moving keyframes to find whats causing your problems and then avoid it, change workflow and find other way to do things at least until its fixed, thats what i did with some bugs.

If you did heavy deleting then save your project and close spriter, then open it again just to be sure nothing was corrupted.

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