A massive update to my Sprite animating tool!

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  • Hello fellow Construct Users

    I'm pleased to announce at long last a huge update to Spriter.

    <img src="http://www.brashmonkey.com/index_htm_files/25.jpg" border="0" />

    brashmonkey.com

    Spriter is now at version 0.8 and has all major features working.

    I'm paying programmers to make Spriter plug-ins for several of the major game authoring packages including Construct 1.x(The Construct 1.x plug in will be free for all Construct users)so that users of those packages can benefit from all of Spriter's intuitive and optimized features.

    Aside form general tweaks and improvements, one of the most important feature additions is the ability to export finished animations as sequential images.

    I've now split Spriter into two versions: Spriter Lite (free) and Spriter Pro.

    Spriter Lite maintains most of the features you're already used (with tweaks and improvements) But Spriter Pro has the full set of features necessary for art asset production for a major game title, such as the ability to merge Spriter projects, Scale entire Spriter projects, and export sequential 24 bit PNG images with alpha channels intact. (Spriter lite can export sequential images, but only BMP without alpha channels.)

    Spriter now also has a Facebook page at:

    facebook.com/pages/Spriter/206503089402447

    Please help support Spriter by spreading the word about it.

    If Spriter is useful to you and you want to see it succeed and improve as rapidly as possible, please consider taking advantage of the Early Adopter sale to get Spriter Pro for a drastically reduced price. Those that do will be greatly appreciated and their bug reports and feature suggestions will be an important part in Spriter's development.

    Thank you very much,

    BrashMonkey

  • Glad its coming along. One question whats the background color for bmp's in "lite"?

  • You set it in the menu to whatever you'd like. Under Edit Pref's/edit colors, guides, etc.

  • that's is really nice. Right on time when I was looking for an animating system

  • This seems like a great animation tool!

    Without a plugin and the limitations of lite (no alpha and not even PNG, come on! <img src="smileys/smiley2.gif" border="0" align="middle" /> ) it's a bit offputting at the moment to try to toy around with.

    Still I'm planning on giving this a serious go soon, as it really looks promising! Any rough idea when the plugin is to be expected?

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  • This looks really great and I'm keen to get it but I don't understand what you mean with the plugins?

    Does it mean you can use it out of Construct 1 and Construct 2 or does it mean one cannot export the images out of the app?

    i.e Can you please explain the plugins and what they do more clearly?

    Also I would really like to use it for Construct 2 - will it work with it?

    Thanks.

  • I will test this.. sounds really useful.

  • You can use Spritre alone to create 2d animations for games, and export them as sequential BMP's or PNG's to use in any game engine BUT what the plug-ins will do is allow you to actually use the Spriter data directly in Construct..so Construct would actually be recreating the animations directly from the Spriter file (VERY little data compared to tons of full framed images)

    But plug-ins are in the works for not just Construct..also for Unity3d, Torque, Multimedia Fusion etc. These are at least several months away though...the plug-ins are complicated and will take time.

  • I guess this is the first time it's mentioned in the forums. but I'm going to be the one making the spriter construct classic plugin. i wanted to point out something about the way it will work with construct, and why it's a powerful tool. look at this image again:

    <img src="http://www.brashmonkey.com/index_htm_files/25.jpg" border="0">

    now imagine this as a large sprite, animated and imported as individual frames in construct. it'd have this huge bounding box filled with alot of empty pixels above and below his sword. and if you made ten frames, you'd have that much vram, every one of those pixels in that square, probably upscaled to the next power of 2 size as well, for every frame of animation. a sprite that huge would eat up everything with a full set of animations, let alone an entire level with multiple characters.

    now look at the image again, and see the individual images like the parts of the arm and leg, and the head, and the sword as individual sprites or textures. this is how it will work when you import it into construct. aside from the the fact it will be less vram for all the individual pieces combined than it would for one frame of the normal way of animating, you can have 10,000 frames without adding additional vram. of course you're using additional system ram, but an insignificant amount because you're not storing textures, just coordinates and angles, so you're free to go pretty crazy with pretty big things.

    it's a very exciting plugin. I believe

    uses a similar system to make huge sprites, and there are other companies that have done it as well. but I don't think there's ever been a general purpose animator like this, that saves to a format that can be imported into multiple engines, and definitely nothing that you can use to make games with as easily as it will be in construct

  • Thank you Lucid. It's an honor to have such a fantastic extension programmer helping to make Spriter work with Construct.

    Other games of note that use similar methods are Odin Sphere for the ps2, all the Rayman 2d games, vector man games for the Genisis and lots of others.

    In general, once Spriter files are supported for Construct (and other game authoring systems) it will alow people to save huge amounts of file size, ram, and TIME... and suddenly things like characters who's appearance change with power-ups, new weapons, armor etc is an absolute breeze, super painless to do, and also takes almost no additional memory.

    Spriter is by no means perfect yet.. but its shaping up nicely and already at this early stage is quite useable and offers some great benifits.

    I'll make some new step by step tutorials for breaking up and animating a character as soon as I can. (that, bug fixes and improvements to the useability are top priorities)

  • As soon as the plugin is offered, I'd love to have access to a version of Spriter that allows me to see it fully in action. It can be time-limited to whatever period you think is sufficient (even if it would be just 1 day), but to try it, one would need to have transparencies (for character animation).

  • You don't need the alpha EXPORT feature to use the Spriter plug-in. The spriter plug-in will automatically recreate the animations with alpha.

    The only limit to the free version of Spriter regarding Alpha is that if you export animations as sequential images, you can only do so as BMP, which is a format that doesnt support alpha channels.... the Spriter plugin will be using the images (like body parts) you create which will be png and have full alpha support.

    I hope that makes sense.

  • Just curious, but couldn't a similar thing be done in Construct by using blank sprites for the limbs in Constructs bones animator, and then importing the filled sprites for each limb at runtime using Loop Index?

  • that would be a similar effect yes.. Spriter just allows for a robust interface and exact per frame control, as well as visually placing collision rectangles, action points, sounds, and variable changes per frame.

  • Brashmonkey - didn't you make a Construct demo with this character 2-3 years ago. I think, I've played it and I remember I liked how grass and trees were animated. One of the first things I've seen made with Construct.

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