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.

Next release of Spriter (program) on March 24th

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.

update 3/7/13:

fixed some bugs:

<img src="smileys/smiley38.gif" border="0" align="middle" />Fixed a bug where setting an animation directly following automatically generated initialization actions didn't work. The default animation would play anyway. <img src="smileys/smiley38.gif" border="0" align="middle" />Fixed a bug where after a non-looping animation played, the sprites would disappear. <img src="smileys/smiley38.gif" border="0" align="middle" />Fixed a bug where animations containing objects that go into negative scale values would play back incorrectly

update 3/7/13:

fixed some bugs:

<img src="smileys/smiley38.gif" border="0" align="middle" />Fixed a bug where setting an animation directly following automatically generated initialization actions didn't work. The default animation would play anyway. <img src="smileys/smiley38.gif" border="0" align="middle" />Fixed a bug where after a non-looping animation played, the sprites would disappear. <img src="smileys/smiley38.gif" border="0" align="middle" />Fixed a bug where animations containing objects that go into negative scale values would play back incorrectly

dl.dropbox.com/u/48945867/Game/Vale.capx

When the Battle layout is run, there are several problems:

1. The Animation does not switch to the Warrior, rather it stays on the Mage even though it has been set to switch.

2. When Attack is clicked, the animations play with both the sprites flickering, then either of them will randomly disappear.

3. When Bash is clicked, the animation is played and the shield gets detached from the Warrior's arm.

Why is this happening?

Thanks for the bug report!

All fixed. uploading update in a minute.