Spriter

[Trumgottist]

I just heard about this new 2d animation tool, Spriter. So far, I've only watched the Kickstarter video (its Kickstart has seven days to go, but it's well past its goal), but I'm interested. Has any of you heard about it? Thoughts?

[Erwin_Br]

Looks great, but it becomes truly interesting when you're working with a game engine that supports it. Otherwise, Toonboom or Anime Studio or even Flash will do just fine, I think.

[Trumgottist]

Looks great, but it becomes truly interesting when you're working with a game engine that supports it.

That was what I was thinking, yes.

[Trumgottist]

Well, I've backed the Kickstarter (with 68 hours to go, they've got double their goal) and intend to play around with it. It would be fun to add Spriter support to SLUDGE, but I'm not making any promises. (Doing that would require learning how the new graphics code in SLUDGE works, something which goes above my head since Tobias made it faster and compatible with OpenGL ES, so I'd pretty much given up on doing anything else with it, but this might give me reason enough to jump back in and figure it out.) It would make for a much more powerful and flexible animation system.

[Erwin_Br]

Cool! Hopefully they'll also make a Mac version.

Also nice they've already announced on a Unity plugin. And MMF2! (Didn't think MMF was still popular, btw! Brings back memories!)

[Trumgottist]

Cool! Hopefully they'll also make a Mac version.

That has been promised.

[ad7venture]

This looks really promising.  Would be really cool if Sludge incorporated it.  I think I might be interested in trying a project if it was incorporated.  Otherwise, I'll have to follow this project to see where it goes.  I love that art style.  I think one problem for it might be that it works a lot better from a side perspective, which adventures don't use as much.  It would be kind of interesting to do an adventure just from a side perspective using that technique of animation.   

[Erwin_Br]

I think one problem for it might be that it works a lot better from a side perspective, which adventures don't use as much.  It would be kind of interesting to do an adventure just from a side perspective using that technique of animation.   

Yes, the position in which the character faces us in a quarter position is diffcult to animate. In *any* animation tool, by the way. I never use the "modular" approach (using seperate body parts) in this view, because it just doesn't work as well as a side view.

[Trumgottist]

I think one problem for it might be that it works a lot better from a side perspective, which adventures don't use as much.  It would be kind of interesting to do an adventure just from a side perspective using that technique of animation.   

Two words: Walk cycles.

Yes, the position in which the character faces us in a quarter position is diffcult to animate. In *any* animation tool, by the way. I never use the "modular" approach (using seperate body parts) in this view, because it just doesn't work as well as a side view.

Yes, but I think Spriter can be useful even for animations constructed completely of the kind of sprites already supported in SLUDGE. The most immediate use I see for it is to set up the timing between frames. That's something I've been thinking vaguely about adding to the sprite bank editor, to get rid of the animation setup in the script, and thus the "try something - compile - see how it looks - change it - compile…" cycle.

I also see other uses of the tool, even for a project that's built with traditional animation. Like allowing a character to put on a hat. Or how plenty of bytes can be saved by animating the upper body separately for talk animations. That kind of stuff.

[Erwin_Br]

Oh yes, definitely! There are so many possibilities. In Bad Timing I've been trying to have my characters perform several kinds of gestures during talk sequences. It works, but it's not very fluid. Even old games from the early 90's did it better. I remember Sam and Max used this very much. Sam casually putting his hands in his pockets while talking or even walking.

A system such as Spriter will be much more efficient and make things much easier. If Sludge supports it, I would buy a license.

[Trumgottist]

I will look into that properly, but I don't have the time right now. (This weekend, I'll be busy playing tuba in a brass band, and won't get back home until sunday evening.)

[Trumgottist]

I'm now back to SLUDGE development (which the log reveal has been dormant for seven months*), and my current project is to add support for Spriter. (My next project will be to see if I can improve the sound handling. I have ideas, inspired by Deirdra Kiai's new game, but I don't know if they are possible to realise.) The format is more complicated than I initially thought, but I'm optimistic.

They recently released alpha 2 of the new Spriter, which is the first Mac version able to save, and also the first version to save in the new Spriter format.

The only thing I've done today though is add support for rotating sprites. This is a function required to make use of Spriter animations, but it could be useful elsewhere too. To test it, I simply set all sprites to rotate slowly (I haven't added a new rotation function yet - only put in the base functionality without any way to access it), and it produced some interesting effects. (And some almost sickness-inducing ones.)

--

* Please note that doesn't mean that SLUDGE was abandoned during this time. If a bug had been found, it would have been taken care of.

[BigMc]

The function has only the angle as parameter. Isn't it necessary to also specify around which point to rotate?

[Trumgottist]

It rotates around the hotspot.

[Trumgottist]

I've now written a huge post on Spriter in the SLUDGE forum. I suggest that any SLUDGE specific Spriter discussion continues there.

Feel free to discuss Spriter in general in this thread.