lucid's Forum Posts

  • thanks for the bug reports squidget

    And everyone else, fixed that flip/mirror bug. Turns out it was only happening to projects with bones, and I kept testing with a non-boned project. Lesson learned:

    <font color="red"><font size="3">update 3/29/13:

      <img src="smileys/smiley38.gif" border="0" align="middle">Bones now work with the latest version of Spriter beta <img src="smileys/smiley38.gif" border="0" align="middle">Fixed a bug where boned .scml animations weren't flipping properly through scale ratio action

    </font></font>

  • hi zsangerous. We will get automatic updates in there at some point. I know checking forums isn't the most convenient thing, just necessary for the moment. Also, please elaborate on why it's much harder to use. There wasn't any vast overhaul to the featureset, and definitely that isn't what I'd consider a small complaint. Useability is THE most important thing. So, yes we will have tutorials (including video tutorials), but I'm still interested in what makes it harder to use than the previous version. And thanks for the input

  • The latest version of Spriter beta fixed c-7's problem. Please see if it fixes anyone elses issues as well:

    download here

    This thread at BrashMonkey forums has up to the minute bug fixes for in between builds until we drop the 'pre' from 'pre-beta'.

    With this latest version, anyone experience glitchy playback in c2 please load and resave with this, and let me know if it fixes the issue

  • Ok everyone. I will look into all these issues. On BrashMonkey.com, first posts usually take a day for your first post, as all have to be approved manually (only thing that worked against the spam onslaught).

    Thanks everyone for the bug reports and sample files to help reproduce them.

  • lucid thanks for the updates man! Great new features! I won't get a chance to download for a couple days most likely, but wanted to ask if the memory leak has been fixed? In Alpha 4a if I left an animation running on the stage in Spriter it would steadily increase the amount of memory used, my guess is each frame was staying resident in memory...

    There should be no memory leaks in this version, and recently we tested for leaks specifically. Also, in general this version is much more efficient with RAM.

    The good news is that I'm able to import most boned projects now. Yay!

    I don't get the crash I did in the previous spriter version, but with one of my spriter files I simply get no actual sprite objects imported. The spriter file imports and creates the events and a folder/family for its sprite objects, but the sprite objects themselves don't appear, which means the animation won't run. The files are named in spriter and they're all in the same folder as the .scml file I'm importing.

    Edit: More testing. Creating a new project with bones seems to work, but importing one project I created in the previous version of spriter seems to get the above behavior, even if I open and save it with the new version. Some of my old projects import fine, but one still doesn't. Very strange.

    Another question - is there a way to mirror sprites in this version? I can flip and mirror them by setting the width to a negative value, but that mirrors them on the Y axis as well.

    Hi Squidget, please send me the file in question at lucid@brashmonkey.com, and I'll see what I can find. For the mirroring, I'm assuming you mean in the plugin, and not the editor.   In the plugin the 'set scale' action has options for mirroring and flipping.

    Thanks guys. Good to be back.

  • I'll take a look nemo.

    Also, new version of Spriter is out, that saves boned animations that work with c2

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  • hi Kenargo. At some future point I will see what we can do about being able to resize at edittime. For now the resizing actions are the only way. Mirroring the sprites can be do the same way(through the set scale action).

    Exporting to Png is mainly if you're using a platform that doesn't support direct playback of spriter animations. With export to png, the vram usage increases with each frame you export, so the smoother and larger you make your animation the more memory it takes up. Each new animation like run, walk, jump, all take their toll on precious video memory. With spriter animations, the original set of body parts is the total amount of vram you use. You can playback every animation at 60 fps, and make 1000 different animations if you wish, which would be completely impossible with traditional sprites. So basically, using the plugin (modular animation) allows you to have greater variety of different characters, your characters can be larger, more smoothly animated, and have a greater variety of animations, for the same cost of vram as if you gave up all those advantages and went with regular frame by frame animation(export to png).

  • Am I doing this correctly?

    I drag/drop the scml file onto the layout and it expands the animation components to a large pile of stuff (sorry if that isn't game jargon). It appears that you edit behaviors and such on the object but if you want to place the animation you select all components of the animation (all animation parts are consolidated under a 'container').

    Does this sound about correct or might I be doing something wrong?

    hi kenargo. Sounds about right. I'll probably work out with Ashley the best way to get a better visual representation to drag around the Spriter object itself, but as of now, the Spriter object is a blank square you can drag around to place the object. The large pile of stuff is all the 'body parts', and the Spriter plugin will take control of them, and move them to itself(the blank square) upon start of layout

    Newbie C2 user here.

    Is it/will it be possible to use Spriter in C2 to make the player customize a character without having the graphics predesigned? Like having a character editor?

    Example:

    The main character of the game has its clothes and a sword.

    But the player wants the character to also have a helmet, a shield, different hair style, and change eye color.

    Thanks in advance.

    Not possible yet, but definitely will be, this is already supported in Spriter's file format, but hasn't yet been implemented in the current version of Spriter, (or the plugin). You could probably find a way to do this through events, loading in new images to the sprite objects at runtime, but I wouldn't recommend it, because of the workload involved, and the events would need rewriting to take advantage of whichever way it ends up working in the final product.

  • not sure if this is what you mean, but it will always take the shortest route. If you have the animation set to looping, it will take the shortest route even if it has to go through the loop border between 0 and the end of the animation. If your current time is 900 in a 1000ms animation, and you try to play to 15ms and animation looping is on, it will play through the end, and loop back to the beginning until 15ms.

    if that's not what's happening, or turning off looping for the animation doesn't fix it, let me know

  • there should be no limit to the number of scml files.

    jayderyu, I tried with your capx with the latest versions of c2 and the plugin, and just moved the actions from start of layout to on initialized and it worked fine.

  • hi jayderyu, that one doesn't work because Spriter has no animations ready to play until after 'on_initialized'. It is ignoring actions for animations it can't find, which is all of them at Start of Layout until on_initialized. I will probably eventually make it so at least it will save the animation name for later at some point.

    In the meantime, you just need to move those actions to the end of 'on_initialized' and it will work as expected

  • Just as an update.

    * Pause animation playback, doesn't do anything :(

    * "Set playback speed ratio"(for pausing, so 0) needs to be after "set animation" or else it will error on line 1295 of the plugin

    both of these work fine for me, please make sure you have the latest version, and if it doesn't work, please send me a minimal capx if possible

    Can there also be AnimateToKeyFrame(frameNumber). I find using Spriter to scroll a menu up and down for a controller to be really nice. Rather than using set speed ratio. Animate to frame would be way better.

    <font color="red"><font size="3">update 3/8/13:

      <img src="smileys/smiley38.gif" border="0" align="middle">Added 'Play animation to...' action and associated expressions. Allows you to specify an endpoint in milliseconds, ratio of full animation length, or keyframe number, and plays the current animation from it's current time to that point taking the shortest route

    </font></font>

    as a temporary update for Spriter into C2. You can copy and paste the SCML file into the C2/File folder. It does work. This however doesn't take into account new objects. Now I'm not sure which part is responsible the plugin add object or the plugin itself. It would be great that on startup of C2 the Spriter Plugin can go over the spriter event sheet, and images and put them where they should be.

    good workaround, but be careful, as this method is unsupported, and weird things are bound to happen in certain situations.

    It would be great that Spriter Plugin handle it's own XML parsing rather require other technology. That way C2 Spriter can be moved to different platforms and not have to wait for other technology to provide the DomXMLParsing shim.

    Would be nice, but not possible in the near future

  • I always love updates to this plugin :)

    Excellent, this next ones in response to your bug report:

      <img src="smileys/smiley38.gif" border="0" align="middle" />Animations now use alpha data from scml to control sprite opacity during playback.

  • update

    also, noticed that in your cap, I couldn't find the conditions for scml plugin like 'On Animation {animation name} Finished' or 'On Any Animation Finished'. Not sure why that is, perhaps you started the cap with an older version of the plugin? I thought C2 was supposed to allow conditions to be added to a plugin mid project, though, so I'll see what I can find out about that.