Why does Spriter Pro Lag

[TheRedFireMan]

when i was messing with z order, using the middle mouse button to move the canvas, selecting different animations, or even try to assign images to bones, spriter pro just wants to lag for like 5 to 10 secs. it does that half of the time.

does it have anything to do with my computer specs? does it have to do with what motherboard im using? does it have any correlation with how much ram im using? does it have anything to do with my SSDs? rewrite/write speeds?

If its nothing to do with hardware, then could be where i placed my files? anything to do with the setup with my antivirus softwares? could it have to do with the fact i dont have the latest plugins?

[Mike at BrashMonkey]

Hi TheRedFireMan,

Obviously a faster compute with more ram would always help, but this sounds like very uncommonly poor performance.

My best (wild) guess is you're using massive images. Is this the case?

Whats the average image size and how many are you using in the project?

thanks,
Mike at BrashMonkey

 

[TheRedFireMan]

Well first off i currently have 16 gigs of ram, secondly i am using 16 images that are worth 146 KB in total file size after i went to gimp and reduce the size in half, the dimension of each image is like 50x60, 40x20, 60x80 and the biggest images are the shell, body, claws and eyes by 100x100, 130x160, which most of them average between 2 to 4 kb, but the biggest images are like 13 kb and 20 kb

!n my spriter files i have about 25 bones im using to animate this crab.

10 bones both arms and claws, 12 bones for 4 legs, and 3 bones for the body and 2 eyes.

[Mike at BrashMonkey]

Hi again TheRedFireMan,

That's one cute hermit crab! Nice work.

The size and amount of images should definitely not be causing any performance issues.

What OS are you running on?

Also, would you be willing to zip up and send the Spriter project (all image files and scml or scon file) to mail@brashmonkey.com so we can take a look and see if anything is strange in the Spriter file itself?

Hopefully we can figure out the cause for this bottleneck asap.

thanks for your patience.

-Mike at BrashMonkey

 

 

 

[TheRedFireMan]

did you get my email?

[Mike at BrashMonkey]

Yes. won't be able to look into it until tomorrow.

 

Thanks for your patience.

 

 

[Mike at BrashMonkey]

Actually. Scratch that.  I was just now able to load it up and spotted the issue. Somehow your animation length ended up at zero! This is clearly causing some severe issues in Spriter and causing the slow-down.

 

To fix it... set the animation duration to something like 1000 and then save. Then reload the file and all should be fixed.

 

cheers.
-Mike at BrashMonkey

 

[TheRedFireMan]

Oh well that's because I was trying to set some animations to idle, or I thought it would take up more data.

If I wanted the animation to end at 300 frame length but to prevent lag I have to set it at 1000, then it would awkwardly loop the animation the wrong way.

How would I get the animation to last at a certain point and port it as scml scon?

[Mike at BrashMonkey]

If there are no additionally keyframes the duration won't take any additional data... plus remember, a duration of zero would mean it would NEVER appear.. A duration of 1 would mean it would be visible for 1 thousandth of a second, which would also be invisible to the human eye.

You should not be thinking in terms of "frames" but in terms of fractions of a second. Spriter animations are tweened by their nature (unless set otherwise) and play back at the smoothest possible frame rate (Frames Per Second) that the target platform/game engine can handle.. so FPS is completely arbitrary when creating your animations. This is why Spriter's timeline by default is based on actual time (fractions of a second) and not an arbitrary FPS limit.

If you want the animation to last 1 second, set the timeline to 1000, if you want it to last 2 seconds, set the timeline to 2000 and so forth.

You can set the animation duration to anything you'd like, so long as it's not zero. Zero makes no sense and apparently because we never tried setting the animation duration to that amount, we never noticed it wold cause performance issues. Luckily this is easily avoided by not setting the animation duration to zero.

I know a lot of people learned to think and animate based on some arbitrary FPS, so Spriter can be set up the same way by turning on snapping and setting the snapping and even play-back intervals.

Find the red magnet icon near the play button area in the timeline.. Click that to turn om snapping and click the little "..." icon near it to open up the dialogue to set up all your snapping and playback options.

I hope this info was helpful.

Cheers.
-Mike at BrashMonkey