Spriter/C2 - (9-16-2019 - bug fix)

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

That was what I thought though I tried something that didn't work so I suspect I may still be missing something. What I did was to move the pile of part off screen and left the box on screen at the location I wanted the Spriter object to appear but when I ran the project the character appeared to drop from the location up and off screen (which happened to be where the pile of parts was located). I also noticed that the size of the box doesn't appear to affect the Spriter size?

One last question if you don't mind. When you have an animated character the moves (for example left and right) I don't see an option to mirror (like for sprites) so I am guessing that I would need to create Spriter animations for each direction of motion?

Sorry, I lied, one more. Since Spriter can export as a series of png files what is the benefit of the plug-in vs using a sprite (just curious and if my lack of game knowledge is showing feel free to redirect me)

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).

Great and thanks, this is beginning to make some sense.

lucid,

After the recent update I have been experiencing this sort of blinking effect when I switch animations in my game. And that's because there's one empty frame at the beginning of each animation.

I'll take a look nemo.

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

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...

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.

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.

So I'm not really sure why, by my SCML file just glitches all over the place in C2 at runtime. Everything is sort of close to where it should be, but the body parts jump around and it doesn't seem to play all the way through. An older SCML file of mine worked just fine, but this newer one doesn't. I'm using the multiple timelines now, which may be the cause. But I changed one of the animations so that every object was represented on every key frame and got the same results. I also added a keyframe at the end of the animation (MS 1000 for me), which seemed to improve things, but its still all over the place.

I've e-mailed my SCML (and mentioned this on the BrashMonkey forums, but that comment is still waiting approval) so maybe you know something I don't.

I was able to get my broken spriter file resolved, I think it was a filenaming issue. I'm still not able to get mirroring to work properly though. Setting the scale to a negative value will flip AND mirror the sprite (not what I want), while using the X and Y flipping in any combination seems to distort the animation and nothing more. Does anyone have any examples where they have gotten mirroring to work correctly? I am using a boned project if that helps.

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.

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

lucid , i have a question ... does spriter gets automatic update or at least a note comes at the start says there is a new update or no ??? if no , can you put it because its really hard for us to keep viewing the news of spriter without any notifications...

2nd thing i feel spriter is much harder than before can you do a small starter guide video with shortcut , some steps , how to use the weird timeline .... last thing i want to say is : thanks for your great work :)

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

Tested and these problems exist for me after saving in the latest version:

Using Flip X or Flip Y in the scaling event still seems to distort the sprite for me. All of the parts rotate oddly around themselves and the sprite ends up a mess. I still haven't found a way to get mirroring to work as a result of this.

I'm also getting some odd behavior with the sprite and moving between layouts. When I have a spriter file on multiple layouts, it seems to not associate the parts with the spriter file when moving from one layout to another. Here steps to reproduce:

1. Create a new empty C2 project and import a spriter file.

2. Add a second blank layout and put a copy of the spriter object on that layout (or create a copy at the start of the layout through events.)

3. Add an event on layout 1 that moves to layout 2 when you press a key.

On the first layout, the sprite plays and animates fine. On the second layout it just shows up as a pile of objects and doesn't animate at all. I'm guessing that the On Initialized event isn't firing somehow, and the sprites aren't getting associated with the SCML plugin as a result.

Thanks as always for your work on this. :)