Hey,
I'm the creator of darkFunction Editor ( http://www.darkfunction.com ). It's still a work in progress really and addresses more of a niche than Andrea's excellent tool Texture Packer. I just wanted to highlight the differences...
TexturePacker undoubtedly is better currently for taking a bunch of images and creating a spritesheet from them. This is something darkFunction supports but not to the same degree. So if that's all you need then you are better off with TexturePacker.
Where darkFunction excels is taking a single large spritesheet image like the ones often found online and being able to very rapidly define a sheet. The animation editor then has the ability to use these sprites in an animation extremely flexibly- you're not limited to one sprite per frame. This has a significant space-saving advantage, in that very complex animations can be built from small reusable parts, and there is no need to maintain images for every animation. An example of a mecha-robot-thing is shown on the website. A large robot is animated from lots of parts- if you wanted to use a single image for every frame of every animation the space used would be considerable- but with darkFunction Editor you just need to edit the image containing all the parts. This has the advantage of only ever needing to change one image to change every animation. And your artist doesn't need to be involved for you to tweak the animations. In a real-world game studio this is extremely efficient.
It is a work in progress and will be supporting many more formats soon. Rather than compete directly with TexturePacker (I have a full time job too) I will be allowing it to work with TexturePacker formats to give everyone the best of both worlds.
Sorry for the threadjack by the way. Just wanted to say hi, and thank you to Slydog for the import code.
I'm the creator of darkFunction Editor ( http://www.darkfunction.com ). It's still a work in progress really and addresses more of a niche than Andrea's excellent tool Texture Packer. I just wanted to highlight the differences...
TexturePacker undoubtedly is better currently for taking a bunch of images and creating a spritesheet from them. This is something darkFunction supports but not to the same degree. So if that's all you need then you are better off with TexturePacker.
Where darkFunction excels is taking a single large spritesheet image like the ones often found online and being able to very rapidly define a sheet. The animation editor then has the ability to use these sprites in an animation extremely flexibly- you're not limited to one sprite per frame. This has a significant space-saving advantage, in that very complex animations can be built from small reusable parts, and there is no need to maintain images for every animation. An example of a mecha-robot-thing is shown on the website. A large robot is animated from lots of parts- if you wanted to use a single image for every frame of every animation the space used would be considerable- but with darkFunction Editor you just need to edit the image containing all the parts. This has the advantage of only ever needing to change one image to change every animation. And your artist doesn't need to be involved for you to tweak the animations. In a real-world game studio this is extremely efficient.
It is a work in progress and will be supporting many more formats soon. Rather than compete directly with TexturePacker (I have a full time job too) I will be allowing it to work with TexturePacker formats to give everyone the best of both worlds.
Sorry for the threadjack by the way. Just wanted to say hi, and thank you to Slydog for the import code.