Spriter - potentially very useful new sprite creation tool

[bigsofty]

I am doing a 3D game just now but I can see this becoming incredibly useful long-term! 

[Slydog]

Wampus, great work, and cool demo!   

How did you do your amazing 'sand storm' effect, that is awesome!
A bunch of semi-transparent sprites moving at different speeds?

[Wampus]

Are you going to be publishing source/a library anytime soon?

Not for a while yet. Spriter 1.0 has a planned release date somewhere in September. I wasn't intending to publish source/libraries until the first full version of Spriter is ready. I could be nudged to do otherwise. On the other hand I know you were thinking of having a go yourself.

How did you do your amazing 'sand storm' effect, that is awesome!
A bunch of semi-transparent sprites moving at different speeds?

Exactly it. I used three semi-transparent sprites. In theory only two should be needed for a good mist/storm visuals. I think there are some tricks to it I haven't found yet.

[FutureCow]

Are you going to be publishing source/a library anytime soon?

Not for a while yet. Spriter 1.0 has a planned release date somewhere in September. I wasn't intending to publish source/libraries until the first full version of Spriter is ready. I could be nudged to do otherwise. On the other hand I know you were thinking of having a go yourself.

*Insert nudge here*

I am thinking of possibly having a go myself, but at the moment what time I have is devoted to trying to learn to do reasonable animations in Spriter. It'd be good to be able to throw that into my project in the short term and see my sprite "skillls" (cough) at work without having to write all the spriter code first.
If you end up waiting until the file format is finalised then I might end up working on it at some point in the interim.
It's looking good though - love the fog effect too!

[Wampus]

Ok, I'll release source for supporting Spriter Beta. Since the current version is free to use, will always be free to use and is still very functional even without tweening I'm sure it will come in handy.

I will need to clean it up, make it work with any file (not just the reference example included with Spriter) and do away with the dependency on Texture Packer my code currently has. Unfortunately I won't have the time for that until next weekend but I'll get it done.

[Falstaff]

Wow this looks awesome, especially if you get a GLB lib going. It's too late for my current project but hopefully it'll be ready in time for the next one

[Wampus]

I was meant to work on this during the weekend. Instead I was so tired I just lay around watching Anime. Will get on this now though. Might take until late Wednesday to complete. The native format for Beta version is a bit...awkward, if not converted.

[erico]

Gasp, I missed the video!
Looks really great! It all looks soo smooth, congrat Wampus!

[siatek]

Any news ? Its looking so promising !!! I can't stop thinking about it ...

[Wampus]

For a long time all my projects were put on hold, including this one. I was also kind of hoping a more definitive Spriter file format could be settled on before I wrote a complete interpreter and sprite handling routine. The file format could be a while. So, here is where I'm at: This weekend is Ludum Dare. I'm hoping to improve on my hapless first try in the last competition so can't do it too soon. Next weekend is free as far as I know so Spriter support (whatever version is current) is down on my calendar.

2-3rd of September.

[siatek]

+1

[Wampus]

Wow I suck with my deadlines.

1st-3rd September was a long holiday weekend here in Canada so had family and friends visiting, keeping me busy. I wasn't free like I expected. Had no time to code then so instead I'll be coding Spriter support in the evenings this week until its done. I'll post a progress update each night.

New file format was released very recently with a new update to Spriter. I'm not going to try to add backwards compatibility with earlier versions of Spriter.

[Wampus]

Update for 4/9: Making the current Spriter file format work well with GLBasic isn't optimal. For example, I want to use polyvectors without having to swap textures too much. That requires a conversion to something looking more like conventional sprite sheets. Writing the code to do that first, though it shouldn't be too hard since I've done this before. Packing the sprites and getting the relevant data in arrays is pretty much done. I now need to test it by writing the code to display the sprites.

[Wampus]

Loading the new file format appears to be working. I'm going to use Texture Packer to create the sprite sheets for now, just for speed testing. Released code will include its own texture creation routine so you won't have to buy a third party tool to use it. I'm excited about this since tweening is now a feature, although very basic.

If anyone is interested here is the old spriter demo including the full source code.

Although this doesn't really demonstrate tweening that well you can get a glimpse from this video:-

[erico]

This is looking really cool!

...gives me the urge to remake GLADIATOR!