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haha thanks, gotta have hoodies though

Hey,

my name is Jon and I run a very small indie company called SKN3. I am posting some information here about our new app called Objecty. We have just released an alpha demo for people to try and would like to get as much feedback as possible.



Objecty is an app for all game developers regardless of engine, language or framework. Object makes game artwork and asset related tasks a breeze. We can pack textures to improve game performance; Animate characters using a skeletal structure to produce efficient and fluid graphics; Create game objects that allow us to organise things without manually editing data files, and a whole lot more!

Basically if you have ever made a game at some point you would have needed to make an editor, manually edited some text files or generally just do some grunt work in a pretty inflexible way. With Objecty our mission is to change that, without changing what you make games in!

So that's the blurb and I hope this interests you guys so go check it out!

Click to view the project page

(The download link can be found at the top of the introduction )

Thanks!

...starting next Tuesday.. HAH

I have been pondering it and people seem to be suggesting it more and more. How would you feel if it only had the texture packing and animation bits in the demo? (eg none of the more advanced things such as the level editor and boned animation). Would that still be an effective demo?

Yes! That would be an effective demo. Texture packing and basic animation is already enough for Objecty to have a market niche as a complete version 1.0 application, imo. It doesn't matter that other features, fantastic as they are, won't be available yet. It surely wouldn't hurt to let people have a play, that's for sure. You'll probably find there will be some who want to pay for an alpha version as it is.

Hey wampus thanks for the help! It is really hard to pull away from releasing a perfect product straight off, but it does sound like that is the best course of action

I'll be sure to be posting some info here when the demo is ready and the campaign begins! Might be a week or two as I want to tie some bits up in the demo before releasing, I think I'll give myself 10 days to get the build up to demo state so I don't just let it slip (all too easy).

Love the tiles :-) Oooh they're mine

Hehe and a mighty fine pixel set it is! It was proper helpful as this video is taking ages to make and didn't have time to make my own! Have you had many people using them? I'll be sure to credit you on the final video, you should have some sort of "the sprites are used here" page showing where they are being used.

Mighty fine ideas there.

Are you going to make an early form of Objecty available for download? Even if its still very much alpha it would generate interest.

I have been pondering it and people seem to be suggesting it more and more. How would you feel if it only had the texture packing and animation bits in the demo? (eg none of the more advanced things such as the level editor and boned animation). Would that still be an effective demo?

I am currently putting the finishing touches on a campaign video for indiegogo (similar to kickstarter) to try and get some financial backing for Objecty.

In the video I want to demonstrate some of the features that will be added if I can get enough funding. I spent about 4-5 hours today adding a level editor demo into Objecty

This is a fully functioning editor and it ties into Objecty's existing texture packing so tiles are single surface packed instead of an image-strip. This means we can also do cool stuff like edge colour bleeding on each tile!

Eventually I could expand it to allow placing of sprites, shapes and boned characters. If it took me 4 hours to get here, imagine what a months worth of development would achieve!

Objecty does all of exporting via lua scripts so it will be really easy to support the wealth of runtimes out there. The scripts folder is available to the public so there are no limitations on what exporters you can write.

Hey thanks

Sorry for a slow reply I was out of the country! It has definitely been my focus to cut out all the bloat and just concentrate on what I hope is the core set of features. I'll probably add in some bloat later on but there are places I can tuck that bloat away hidden from general day to day use

I am currently shooting some video footage for an indiegogo campaign so will be posting more details about Objecty soon!

cool i am very surprised that no one has released something like that up until now! I just hope that there is enough space for two competing projects as I am currently filming a video to start an indiegogo campaign!

Oh yeah, do that. If you weren't already planning to do so, get a list of the game development groups in Canada and send them a press statement about Objecty once its up on Indiegogo. Indiegogo might be on a smaller scale than Kickstarter but Canada has a lot of game developers. Do it soon too, because you might see more competition spring up in time! Suddenly it seems crazy that tools like Objecty have only been available in-house before now.

Looks like there are considerable differences between your app and Spriter, so there should be space in the market. For example, to support Spriter in its current format I'm looking at having to include my own code for packing textures for speed since it saves every anim part as a separate png file. Your app takes care of that sort of thing already.

I'll have to wait to see what Objecty does but I'm guessing it will be better suited for quicker development cycles.

All very good advice! I actually live in the UK. It's a shame that kickstarter doesn't support uk users as I would probably use that instead! As part of my preperation I am going to have to do a lot of research for different dev communities and companies me thinks!

Objecty will definitely provide a more overall solution to game assets! It really depends on how much support I can get before or after its released as this will help push some of the more interesting features ahead in the schedule.

I want to and I need to. Its giving something back, etc. Also, my game artist kept pointing out animation tweening in games and asking if she could use similar techniques. By the time we're working on our next game that will be possible.

cool i am very surprised that no one has released something like that up until now! I just hope that there is enough space for two competing projects as I am currently filming a video to start an indiegogo campaign!

Doesn't "getting boned" mean something else?

Lol I should probably think HARDER about my forum topic titles

Excellent. I like the option of edge bleeding applied to individual images or all at once. Very useful.

Feel free to email me about anything related to this. Next week I happen to be putting together some basic Spriter support in GLBasic. Much of the math and methods involved will be similar to supporting Objecty animation so I should be in a good position to get something working once you're ready to release.

Thanks Im glad it seems like a worthwhile feature. Most apps just let you do it across the entire texture so thought it would be a nice little addition!

Awesome thanks for the help! I will definitely be contacting you at some point. So are you doing the spriter code officially for them or is that something you just wanted to do ?

Thanking you both

Stirling work. I use Texture Packer and have been following the progress of Spriter. Your software appears to do much of the work that both these tools do combined into one package.

I have a couple of questions:-

1) Is there or will there be an 'extrude' option for the edges of sprites to be spread out beyond their normal borders? This is important for creating sprite sheets that can tile seamlessly while scaling and moving.

2) Is there GLBasic specific code for support of the sprite sheets and animation yet? If not, will you need some assistance with that?

1) There is edge bleeding which you can apply to specific image nodes or you can select them all and apply bleeding to all at once.


2) There is no specific GLBasic code yet. I am waiting to nearer release and then I will write the exporters. Objecty uses a lua based api so anyone can write their own exporters if they want. Any help would be great, perhaps I can email you if I get stuck when it comes to the GLBasic side of things?

This is a test exporter I have for outputting a css sprite sheet

Code (glbasic) Select Expand

function export(atlas)
--DebugLog("spaces = "..settings.class_names.spaces)

-- get some properties
atlasId = atlas:Attribute("id")
atlasSheets = atlas:Attribute("atlas_sheets_total")
atlasWidth = atlas:Attribute("width")
atlasHeight = atlas:Attribute("height")
atlasPath = atlas:Attribute("atlas_output_data_file")

-- create the file for writting
file = CreateFile(atlasPath)
htmlFile = CreateFile(ChangePathExtension(atlasPath,"html"))

-- css header
file:WriteLine("/* Atlas '"..atlasId.."' exported by Objecty - www.skn3.com */")

-- html header
htmlFile:WriteLine("<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN\" \"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd\">\n<html xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml\" lang=\"en\" xml:lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">\n\t<head>\n\t\t<link type=\"text/css\" rel=\"stylesheet\" media=\"screen\" href=\""..FileName(atlasPath).."\" />\n\t</head>\n\t<body>\n")

-- loop through each page of the atlas
for sheetIndex = 0,atlasSheets-1,1 do
-- get filename for the image
if atlasSheets > 1 then
-- multiple sheets
imagePath = ChangePathExtension(PostfixPath(atlasPath,"_"..sheetIndex),"png")
else
-- single sheet
imagePath = ChangePathExtension(atlasPath,"png")
end

-- create the image for this sheet
image = CreateImage(atlasWidth,atlasHeight)

-- write comment header
if atlasSheets > 1 then
file:WriteLine("/* Atlas '"..atlasId.."' sheet "..sheetIndex.." */")
end

-- loop through all atlas items
for atlasItem in atlas:Children() do
if atlasSheets == 1 or atlasItem:Attribute("atlas_item_sheet_index") == sheetIndex then
-- paste image
image:Paste(atlasItem:Attribute("image"),atlasItem:Attribute("x"),atlasItem:Attribute("y"))

-- make id
atlasItemId = atlasId.."_"..ValidId(atlasItem:Attribute("id"))

-- add to file
file:WriteLine("."..atlasItemId.." { \n\tbackground: url('"..imagePath.."') no-repeat -"..atlasItem:Attribute("x").."px -"..atlasItem:Attribute("y").."px;\n\twidth: "..atlasItem:Attribute("width").."px;\n\theight: "..atlasItem:Attribute("height").."px;\n }")

-- add to html
htmlFile:WriteLine("\t\t<div class=\""..atlasItemId.."\"></div>")
end
end

-- write end of sheet
file:WriteLine("")

-- save the image for this sheet
image:Save(imagePath)
image:Close()
end

-- html footer
htmlFile:WriteLine("\t</body>\n</html>")

-- close the output file
file:Close()
htmlFile:Close()
end

There is one little piece of info in that script which is the part talking about sheets. I should point out that it was requested on this forum for the texture to auto split onto multiple sheets. Well I added that feature a while back and as you can see multiple sheets 

[I can add a texture node and add some image nodes to it]

I posted about my app Objecty a while ago now and just thought I would post an update as I made something exciting this afternoon!

I have been hard at work in the last 3 or so months since my previous post. I have been building up the framework that Objecty uses. Its got to the stage now where I can really quickly add things and have everything interact.

Objecty is amazingly powerful and really easy to use. Here's a little example with pictures:

I can add a texture node and add some image nodes to it



I can define any number of hotspots on my image nodes



I can then create a sprite node which is for working with pixel based animations. To that sprite node I can add animation nodes and reuse the image nodes that were already added to the texture node.



Or if I want to be adventurous I can build an actor node out of image nodes with a bone structure. This allows me to piece together a larger "character" out of smaller bits and animate it using keyframing and/or tweening.



The bone editor has been coded in the last 2 or 3 hours (from scratch) so there is not much detail to it yet. This was incredibly satisfying as the hard work with the Objecty framework is starting to pay off!

Well that's all for now

Awesome I will definitely look out for it. Do you have any screenshots or anything ?

I can do better than that you can try out the Beta if you wish
Download PlebZ BETA v0.9

Password for the Beta is "uberninja". Hope I don't take your thread off topic :-/

Hey thats nicely polished Seems like a nice fun casual game, I noticed that it was a bit tricky to move in the direction I wanted?

Hey Zero.. or ..Spicey, yes I do remember you, how are you doing ? Are you a GLBasic person these days then?

Yeh I made the transition a while back and have been loving building stuff for the iOS I noticed the deli game on your website, good to see it's still living strong. I'm just about to release a new iPhone game called PlebZ, look out for it

Awesome I will definitely look out for it. Do you have any screenshots or anything ?

Thanks for the advice