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Spriter.... What now, really?


MasterZenith

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Spriter no longer opens up a few files I have. Spriter opens up other files just fine, but the files I am trying to get to work on, Spriter executes, but immediately after the Spriter window opens up, Spriter does nothing, my CPU is racing  and the only thing I can do is clock the window to turn it white, then crash Spriter.

Don't tell me Spriter corrupted my files, losing them forever.....

I am tired of Spriter constantly crashing, making me lose hours of work, and now Spriter won't even open up some of my project files. 

 

Anything I can do to solve this issue?

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I have, like, 200 files for the same project because Spriter is a complete mess and saves my files under a million different names. Some of them I can load, but they are days behind. One file, my most recent one, will show the loading bar after Spriter opens, but Spriter is stuck at 94%, then becomes unresponsive. Other files of this project will not load at all.

If you need anymore information, please ask. Thank you.

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I'm sorry you're running into problems MasterZenith,
 

Would you mind zipping and sending your Spriter project (mike@brashmonkey.com) with the all required images and the scml file you want to open that is failing to do so?

 

Maybe we can fix it, and maybe we can figure out what caused the problem in the first place so it won't happen again.

 

About the auto back up feature, it can be turned off if you don't want all the back-up files to be made over time...but isn't it better to risk losing hours or days work instead of all work if such a problem occurs?

 

Thanks for reporting this issue, and for your patience. Hopefully together we can find and fix the cause of the problem, and maybe fix your scml file.

 

PS,

Any program which is crashing a lot on you is more likely to cause corrupted files, as it might crash while saving, etc... so our top priority is figuring out the cause of any crashes you're running into, so please provide any info you can, and I highly recommend at least frequent manual back-ups to new files whenever you've made good progress that you want protected.

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Email sent.

 

For the record, Spriter still constantly crashes and causes me ot lose so much work. I just stopped posting about it because I don't care anymore. But now with corrupted files, I had to post again because this is beyond a game crashing.

Also, I don't know how to explain it, but I can't recall using a program with a worse save feature than Spriter. Autosaving doesn't help and manually saving doesn't help, and I don't need to be using a Cloud service to cover up errors from a 60 dollar program. 

 

Hopefully we can resolve this :)

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@ MasterZenith,

 

Don't forget, for the vast majority of people (including ourselves), Spriter is not crashing. Of the few people that occasionally report problems, it usually is due to the use of very large images and then trying to export at a very large frame count/image-size as GIF etc.  In this case, the cause became obvious after they shared their information and their Spriter projects so we could take a look at them.

 

Not reporting the crashes is only making it less likely they will ever be fixed, unless someone else happens to come across the same issue and takes the time to figure out how to reproduce the crash.

 

Please start screen recording, or trying to remember the last thing you did just before the crash. This should be very easy if Spriter crashes so often while you're using it. This is by far the best, most productive thing you can do to help us fix Spriter for you. It would be different if everyone were reporting these crashes, and if others or we could reproduce the crashes you're experiencing...but this is not the case.

We truly sympathize with your frustration, and hate the fact that Spriter is not working well for you, but because we have no idea how to recreate the crashes, and have no useful information from you (during which situation the crashes appear), its virtually impossible for us to do anything but continue to beg you to record your screen or do some detective work by remembering what you did just before any crash occurs, and then reloading Spriter and trying that same thing again immediately... if the crash happens again, then we'll know how to reproduce the crash, or at least, what causes the crash on your specific system.

Also, I'm still confused on what problem you are having with the the auto-save feature. It's there to help if a file gets destroyed, lost, saved over, or if for any reason the user wants to roll back to an older version of the file. This is inherently useful as far as I can tell, and even specifically in your case, offers the chance to roll back to different older versions and hopefully recover the majority of work you've done.  Could you please explain how is this a bad thing, and how could this be better? (other than Spriter never crashing or causing corrupted files of course.)  I also checked and it seems Spriter does not change your current file save to be the back-ups name after an auto-save... meaning if you are editing a file called "Troll.scml" and then Spriter autosaves as "Troll-autosave.scml" when you choose save or press control+s it will save over "Troll.scml" and NOT over "Troll-autosave.scml". Are you sure you've seen this behavior from Spriter, or was that an assumption?

 

Thanks.

 

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Okay, I'm not good at articulating my issues, but let me try.

I start a new project called Troll. I set auto save to every minute. Everything is fine.

At some point in the project, Spriter begins to go crazy, and while it's deleting bones, or changing animations, or whatever it feels like doing, autosave is saving all of this.

So now I have two files - Troll, which is a few hours old from when I started the project, and TrollAutosave, which just saved the current state of the project with everything wrong.

So, I either have to go back a few hours and redo everything, or deal with the Trollautosave, and fix what I can.

Now, since i have decided to use TrollAutosave, if I manually save, Spriter doesn't save to Troll. Troll doesn't even matter anymore. I am using TrollAutosave, with autosave active.

So now I have the same problem. Spriter crashes, and Trollautosave002 or whatever it is called, is the new autosave, and Trollautosave is a few hours old.

So, for me Autosave is 100% worthless.

Now, circumventing autosave, I decide to use caveman tactics, and manually save, but, I am not going to remember to literally manually save every minute. What now happens? The files are just flat out corrupted. 

 

So I literally cannot manually save with confidence, nor can I use autosave with confidence. 

 

I use Spriter to make commercial games, and waiting to see what is wrong with the files I sent you is wasting my company time and money. We cannot do anything at this point becuase we do not trust the program, yet a ton of content has been used with Spriter, so looking for a more stable program is not feasible at the moment.

We are waiting to see if you can look at the files I emailed you, and tell us what the error so we can avoid it moving forward. I probably messed something up, but I don't know what I could possibly be doing.

If I was just some guy making sprites on my own, spending 60 bucks wouldn't be so bad, I just wouldn't patronizer your products nor advertise it, but this is literally hurting our game development of a commercial game, so I am slightly more frustrated than I would have been if this wasn't my job.

I do hope you can help me figure this out. I really do like this product, but it is wearing thin on me very quickly. Right now, my company is twiddling our thumbs doing nothing, just waiting. Help us detwiddle our thumbs, please!

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"Now, since i have decided to use TrollAutosave, if I manually save, Spriter doesn't save to Troll. Troll doesn't even matter anymore. I am using TrollAutosave, with autosave active."

 

I tested this and this is not the case, (as I stated in my previous post). Did you actually witness this happen (if so, that would be a very strange bug indeed, for autosave to behave this way for you and for no-one else) or are you making an assumption?

"So, for me Autosave is 100% worthless." This is a special circumstance where your work is getting corrupted. If you lose power while working etc, you'll be happy the auto-save feature is there and turned on.. but yes, if its just auto-saving an already corrupted file, this is not really useful.

 

For these reasons, I hope you'll agree, auto-save is very useful, and a good feature, BUT due to a separate problem, auto-save is not currently useful for you...again, unless you lose work due to a power outage and auto-save did its job without any animation corruption happening before-hand.

"So I literally cannot manually save with confidence, nor can I use autosave with confidence."

As I mentioned before, due to many issues in the past with wildly popular and expensive apps (bugs, file corruption, user error or power outages) I developed the habit of manually saving after any relevant progress (usually every few minutes) and it's literally a 4 second sequence of keystrokes while sipping my tea etc.  I understand the notion that this should not be necessary... but especially with important projects and manipulating complicated data that takes a lot of work to create, I highly recommend you develop this habit.. and I'm not talking about only with Spriter. This habit has saved me hours of time and unneeded stress on numerous occasions over the years (with programs ranging from Photoshop and Pro-Motion to writing long emails).  I HATE having to redo things. ;)

"We are waiting to see if you can look at the files I emailed you, and tell us what the error so we can avoid it moving forward. I probably messed something up, but I don't know what I could possibly be doing."

Thanks very much for taking the time to send the files! We managed to fix the files and resend them to you, BUT if you do not get used to manually quickly checking your animations and saving a back up copy after every substantial bit of progress has been made (every few minutes for me), then you certainly run the risk of loosing some work.

 

"If I was just some guy making sprites on my own, spending 60 bucks wouldn't be so bad, I just wouldn't patronizer your products nor advertise it, but this is literally hurting our game development of a commercial game, so I am slightly more frustrated than I would have been if this wasn't my job.

I do hope you can help me figure this out. I really do like this product, but it is wearing thin on me very quickly. Right now, my company is twiddling our thumbs doing nothing, just waiting. Help us detwiddle our thumbs, please!"

Our best hope for the short term is to figure out whats causing the animation data corruption... this is clearly happening to very few people, so there's likely a very specific type of work flow or data editing which you're doing which most people don't do. This means if I was standing over your shoulder watching you work it would likely be obvious to me what you're doing that Spriter is currently not properly coded to handle.  This is why I keep asking for you to record screen, as this is the next best thing.  I know it's an inconvenience, but in this situation its certainly the most easiest thing you could do that has the highest likelihood of helping us resolve the issue. In the very short term after figuring out the cause, you'd know how to avoid the corruption and in the mean-time we'd be making sure the next update build of Spriter no longer has the bug.

 

We are really sorry for this inconvenience. Ironically, it would be much faster and easier to fix if more people were dealing with the same problem (though obviously we're glad they are not).

By the way.. nice animating! Especially great job using sprite stretching and rotation for the gelatinous feel for the drool, webbing etc. Very nice, natural swinging and stretching feeling..nice and gooey.

 

cheers.

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I am not going to remember to literally manually save every minute

I save after EVERY changed keyframe, good habit.

DEleting bones sounds like your workflow isnt properly planned, everytime i made mistake and have to delete bones or stuff from keyframes then i delete them, save project, close spriter, open spriter again and try if something was not deleted etc. and everything is fine.

Spriter is still in kinda WIP state but if your workflow is strong and stable then you should not have problems.I dont.

Try to open file yourself in text editor and remove some lines, the ones that you suspect were created last time, so if you created bone20 then remove all callings for bone20 in spriter file so it wont be loaded and hopefully spriter wont crash.

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I save after EVERY changed keyframe, good habit.

DEleting bones sounds like your workflow isnt properly planned, everytime i made mistake and have to delete bones or stuff from keyframes then i delete them, save project, close spriter, open spriter again and try if something was not deleted etc. and everything is fine.

Spriter is still in kinda WIP state but if your workflow is strong and stable then you should not have problems.I dont.

Try to open file yourself in text editor and remove some lines, the ones that you suspect were created last time, so if you created bone20 then remove all callings for bone20 in spriter file so it wont be loaded and hopefully spriter wont crash.

 

 

"I save after EVERY changed keyframe, good habit." I shouldn't have to do this. I don't for the other six art based programs I use to develop our game. 

 

"DEleting bones sounds like your workflow isnt properly planned" I don't recall saying I ever did this. I said Spriter is deleting bones, not me. When I do delete bones, that's because for some reason, Spriter likes to take some bones and just shoot them all over the place.

 

"Spriter is still in kinda WIP state but if your workflow is strong and stable then you should not have problems.I don't." For a 60 dollar program, Spriter should be working like a 60 dollar program. My workflow is irrelevant here. Also, the argument of "I don't have problems, so you shouldn't" is also irrelevant. 

 

"Try to open file yourself in text editor and remove some lines" No. Not for a 60 dollar, full release program. I don't have to do this for Photoshop, Gimp, Tiled, Manga Studio, etc. If the guys who created Spriter want to charge big boy prices for this program, they are fully aware of the responsibilities that come with this. If Spriter was, say, 12 bucks, like it was on the humble bundle some weeks ago, then sure, I would be more kind, but it isn't.

1) This current issue has been resolved. They fixed my file and our development can get back on track. They were very kind and helped me out in a very fast manner. Their customer service, I can say, is better than any other i have come across for practically, any of the other art programs I use. SO Kudos on them for that.

 

2) But let me be very clear here. I know my tone on this forum is very negative. But they are businessmen who entered the big boy world of development on their own. They charge 60 dollars for their program. They know very well they will deal with buttholes like me who have legitimate issues with Spriter. I';m not the first, and I won't be the last. I sell games myself, and I have to deal with people like me nearly everyday too. Its all part of being your own man/woman and doing business, and so far, they have handled me with professional courtesy that is well beyond any I have had from companies thousands of times larger than them in the past few decades. Because they seem like very well respectable people, I will continue to use Spriter. At the moment, they deserve my money, and I will continue to tell other aspiring artist to use Spriter as well.

 

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From my point of view I can tell you.

 

Im starting to develop videogames and use spriter daily. Im an experienced (good or not) pixel and 3d artist and use spriter for my 2d work, because it takes 10 times less time than doing manually.

 

-Spriter sometimes have bones that do not exist and sometimes duplicate images that belong to other projects appear in a clean project. (this can be a bug) Its not so harming so if you go to the hierarchy and delete the weird images and bones and save, corruption gets away (in my experience).

 

-Sometimes working on a clean project using bones you get weird animations and this 90% of the time have to do with a bone badly linked in different frames. Its fixable by copying bones from the first frame after linking.

 

-I had a pan bug, If I panned with space spriter would crash. I dont know if its fixed because I pan now with the UI cursors, but I didnt get crashes lately.

 

Now I dont get a lot of problems or crashes but this is not the same as saying spriter doesnt have bugs. of course, and it will have.

 

Having so much problems with spriter may have to do with your installation. Did you check your register, defrag your HD and remove useless files? there are applications for this.

 

My computer have more than 7 years old and spriter works exceptionally well, almost zero problems now. Waiting for skin deform :D

 

Cheers.

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@ MasterZenith,

 

I agree you should not have to save after every key frame, AND Spriter should not allow for workflow of any type to cause crashes or corrupted files. The solution we're both after is to figure out the cause of the problem so we can fix things in Spriter itself as quickly as possible.

 

That said, it might be useful to put things in perspective by doing a Google search for "Photoshop crashers" or "Photoshop corrupted my file"

 

My point is, especially when cross platform, but even for just one flavor of OS, with the near infinite variety of hardware/OS version or configuration/software combinations there will always be some small minority of people who run into major problems that don't affect the vast majority of users and are therefore hard to fix... no matter how well funded, well staffed or expensive the software... and while it is a duty of the developers to either fix the problem, or explain a valid work around, or offer a refund to those people affected if a valid solution can not be found in a reasonable amount of time, it's a very good idea to develop manual back-up habits that protect you from potentially catastrophic or just very annoying loss of work, regardless of how trustworthy the software has been to date.

People like myself who are recommending you become less opposed to the practice of manual back-ups "on principle that you should not have to" are not trying to defend Spriter or this particular problem, or trying to put the blame on you for running into the issue, we're simply trying to encourage you to protect yourself from potential loss of work in the future, when using any program, no matter how stable it or past versions if it have been for you.

About finding a real solution, I realized there might be a more convenient way for me to "be looking over your shoulder" while you use Spriter to see if that can help me reproduce or figure out the cause of the bug than to have you screen record and upload a video.

 

If you use Skype, we could schedule a time were we could have a Skype call and you could share screen while working... this way you could work as normal, with no screen recording software running and I could ask questions on the fly, request you try things etc etc.

If you're up for this, please email me at mike@brashmonkey.com and I'll give you my Skype ID info and we can schedule a time that works for our time-zones... I'm in France.

cheers.

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