My question is how it would work for animated characters. Getting a consistent map from all 4 angles for every frame of animation could be difficult. I can definitely see it working well for background elements though.

I ran into a similar problem a while back. I think what you should try is on the jump animation that doesn't have any other buttons pressed, have it check to make sure that the left and right buttons ARE NOT pressed. So your events will be something like, If UP KEY is Down, and Right KEY is NOT DOWN and LEFT KEY is NOT Down then play animation. Hope that helps.

So I finally decided to make the tough decision of revamping my game. I have been tooling with the game for so long and have learned so much that it was getting harder and harder to keep moving forward with the early mistakes I had made.

The biggest problem being the character design. Everyone's first comment is the Superman similarities. While I'm a huge fan of the character, I'm not making a game about Superman and need to distance myself from that. Second, my original design was created to accentuate the character's strenght: small legs and big upper body. That's fine if the player never leaves the ground. My character flies...constantly. So when you flip him over or turn him on his side, those tiny legs look ridiculous.

I'm also wanting to revamp my animation system. For example, there is going to be a different base animation for normal walking and carrying something. Using folders, I can streamline my code and get a better result.

The other changes that are going to be made in the redesign are:

-Dynamic light and shadow for every character (possibly BG's too)

-Slight turning for Civilian characters while being carried

-Cape will be animated separately (possibly react to wind also)

As you can see, I've already started on the new design, combining classic superhero with medieval armor. I've also placed the art next to my original design so that you can see that the art is now much larger. I'm trying to emulate that Capcom vs Marvel arcade look.

I'll post more when I have it.

That looks great lucid . I was wondering if there was going to be any way to lock a frame rate to the Spriter animations. If I remember correctly, the speed will depend on the strength of the computer running the game. I just really think there are huge possibilities for using Spriter for cut scenes and conversations between characters, but it would be too hard to line up the lip sync with the audio file without knowing the frame rate.

Not sure if that's a priority or not. Spriter looks pretty amazing already.

Thanks.

That's really impressive, RandomFellow . What are you doing your character animation in?

mardoch I haven't gotten a chance to try it yet as I've been doing a bit of a redesign. The way I understand it is that when they are hit, you want to set a Y and X vector. Then "on land" trigger another Y and X vector. The trick is to let it know that they are in knockback mode. So I guess I would turn on some variable during that first hit and then turn it off after the bounce. I hope that sets you on your way. Let me know if it works. If you still have trouble, I'll try and do a quick mock up and see if I can get it going.

Let me know how it goes. Thanks.

<img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-iVW_pf3bk1U/Uo2FqxfjLsI/AAAAAAAAC0c/JZ_Qc6VafPI/s1600/Dynamic+Lighting+Test.jpg" border="0" />

So I've been playing with the plugin and really liking the results. I think I can use it for changing the lighting scheme on my 2D characters.

My question is how to use it without setting the parameters to the "light" sprite like in Pode 's example. Its great when I plug my art into his capx, but I'm just wondering if someone can walk me through setting it up without the Light Sprite. I basically just want to control if the light source is left of the screen or right.

Worse case scenario I can just use the light sprite and set its location based on the player. Any help is greatly appreciated.

I'm just starting to play around with the original effect posted. Can anyone tell me if there's a way to change the color of the shadow? Maybe give it a bit of a dark blue hue instead of only black.

I totally agree with you about the hair. When I shrink the sprite in Photoshop, I have it set up to only use certain colors. These colors were set up with the previous version of the character. There isn't a brown in the list of colors so it looks for the closest thing, which is the orange. I need to go in and tweak it. Glad you like it though, damainman

<img src="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/56104169/RedesignSprited%20Allbig.png" border="0" />

Decided to finally bite the bullet and work on some kind of tweak to the character design. I've changed the hair to brown and added gauntlets to play into a motif I have for the game. I'm thinking of adding the ability to deflect energy with them. At the moment I'm leaning towards the design to the right, but we'll see. I'm going to start doing a lot of animating here in a bit and I need to have the new design locked down.

<img src="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/56104169/RedesignInContext%2011-19-13.jpg" border="0" />

Thanks, MelVin . I've been thinking about some kind of bracelet and maybe a change in hair color. Just something I can easily change to the existing sprites. Glad you are liking it though.

<img src="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/56104169/Flight-Angles-Sketch.gif" border="0" />

This has been on my "to-do" list for a long time and I've never gotten around to it. Well that all changes now!...hopefully. The game still has a lot of placeholder art in there. It isn't too surprising because everything is still early on, but those sketches I have in there for flying really bug me. Its about time I fixed those up.