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The principles of client side rendering


caseyryan

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Hi!

I'm totally new to Spriter. To say the truth I've just found it in google and have no idea of how it works, but the title of the software made me think it might be exactly what I am looking for. So, I've created this topic because I have no time to learn all the information which may not finally be useful for my purpose. So, here's the matter. 

We're developing an iOS / Android game with a lot of characters and animations. The project is pretty big, and is written entirely in ActionScript 3 for Adobe AIR runtime. It's almost ready for the release. Until now we have been using Dragon Bones as the animation library. But the huge problem of Dragon Bones is that it does tons of matrix calculations behind the scenes every frame, and so when there's a lot of action going on the stage, the  game starts to freeze from time to time. The freezes are not that essential actually but they spoil a lot of fun of the game. Let's say it might drop from 60 fps to 10 - 15 for a half a second. Adobe Scout shows the reason of them in Dragon Bones, when it starts an uncached timline.

So my questions about Spriter are:

How does its API work? Does it also calculate every motion of a character based on XML / JSON animation on every tick. Or does it build a series of frames on the fly when just initialized and glue them together into a frame by frame animation like a spritesheet animation? This approach would cause a greater memory consumption but it would definitely free up a lot of processing time for the CPU

I'd be grateful if somebody cleared it up to me. This would help me understand if it's worth it to spend some time and write my own ActionScrtipt 3 implementation of Spriter API's or not

Regards, Konstantin

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I'm not sure which platform or implementation you're using, but all of the implementations I know of do all the transformations in real time.  Though I've seen a couple of speed comparisons where Spriter compare's favorably to other modular animation tools, because of the time it saves using the mainline key references instead of having to step through each timeline finding the current key (as opposed to time saved on transformations).   Of course there is the option of exporting to a png sequence or spritesheet direct from Spriter, but I suspect you're wanting to save those space requirements for runtime, so that solution may not work for you.

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