AuthorTopic: A new sprite animating tool in Beta!  (Read 4417 times)

Offline BrashMonkey

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A new sprite animating tool in Beta!

on: October 17, 2010, 08:28:03 am
Hi everyone,
 
After about a year of hard work I've finally released the first public beta version of my sprite animating tool.

It allows for the creation of game character, effect, and item animations by combining multiple smaller images (body parts for instance)co create each completed frame.

This is the sort of technique used to animate characters in games such as Rayman, Vectorman, Alien Soldier, and Odin Sphere!

Please go to www.brashmonkey.com to check out the youtube videos and download the beta version. I'd love your help finding bugs and making feature requests.
 
Please also join the forum at BrashMonkey to post bugs and feature requests as I'm announcing this tool on amny forums and wont be able to keep track of and respond to reports and requests on all of them.


thanks much,
 
BrashMonkey

Offline PixelPiledriver

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Re: A new sprite animating tool in Beta!

Reply #1 on: October 17, 2010, 06:32:54 pm
awesome. you're a pro dude. At the moment I have too much homework to test for you. At some point I'll throw a couple characters together.

Questions: My bad if any of these are answered in the videos or website already.

1 .When you add sounds, collision boxes, variables, action points etc., how do you access these values when you export?
2. You supply a file type and instructions for how to integrate into our own game engine?
3. Or you are building a game engine to specifically accompany this tool?
4. Even though its not the focus of your program, does it support exporting a sequence of pngs if i really want to?
5. What language and editor did you write Spriter and the game demo in?
6. In the game demo the trees are also animated in Spriter? they seem to have transform animation. So does Spriter support frame interpolation like in a 3D tool or like tweening in flash? Or they are animated with matrix multiplications outside of Spriter?
7. Are you shooting for the console market or just PC?

Super bad ass dude. The videos are very clear and educational. the game demo is vibrant and fun.
Its cool to make free software but you might also want to consider making millions of dollars.  :)
And knowing that it is, we seek what it is... ~ Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, Chapter 1

Offline Holymonkey

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Re: A new sprite animating tool in Beta!

Reply #2 on: October 17, 2010, 06:56:19 pm
Hi PixelPiledriver,

1) currently the tool exports a simple, easy to read INI file... pretty much plain english... what image goes where, with what widthm height, alpha ect...
2) I curently do not supply any real description of the file type.. but I will. I'm also speaking with plug-in programmers for many popular game authoring programs and will eventually have export to XML for one or more of them built into the tool..and there will eventuually be plugins for these game authoring programs to support this tools data.
3) I will also working with a team of engineers to create an entire game authoring system that will support this and other tools I will make, and will be able to export to all the major platforms...built on top of "SDL"
4) exporting the animations as fully assembled images is planned...as soon as I can make it happen once the major features and bugs are all taken care of.
5) I used Multimedia Fusion 2 Dev to make spriter.  The game Demo is made with Construct.
6) In the game demo thetrees are actually "programmed"  the character is actually fully rendered frames... the demo was made using Construct ( www.scirra.com ) I built my tool AFTER making that demo because I want to use my tool to make the real version of that game...and do it properly.
7) Eventually Spriter and my games will run on multiple platforms. My games will be commercial, eventually, ther will be a commercial version of Spriter as well, but there will always be a free version with all the critical features (all of the ones in the curent version plus a few more)... The commercial one will just be further enticement for people to donate so I can keep making it and the other tools I plan to make as fast and as good as possible.


thanks for the encouragement!

Offline Tourist

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Re: A new sprite animating tool in Beta!

Reply #3 on: October 18, 2010, 04:17:30 am
Clicking on the exe file produces a message box:

Error
Cannot load trackbar.mfx.  This object might need an external program or library not yet installed.

What are the system requirements for this tool? 

Tourist

Offline BrashMonkey

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Re: A new sprite animating tool in Beta!

Reply #4 on: December 02, 2010, 08:49:09 am
Hi Tourist,

Terribly sorry for the hugely delayed reply.  I've tried to reply repeatedly and for some reason could not....

Anyway, you're the only person to report this issue, BUT it sounds like your antivirus software might have removed this bit (likely false positive...happens all too often these days)  Try going back on www.brashmonkey.com and redownload the program.  It's been updated with full undo and redo support! :)  See if it works after this new install... If not, check your antivirus softwares "virus vault" and see if that missing file is in the vault... if so, "restore" the file and then Spriter should work.

Thanks much.  I hope this solves your problem.

Offline Tourist

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Re: A new sprite animating tool in Beta!

Reply #5 on: December 02, 2010, 05:16:52 pm
Fresh download, same error. 

To be clear, I get the error when clicking the Spriter_beta_0.6.exe file in the original zip (after unzipping the archive to new folder).  If this is an installer (as opposed to a standalone executable) then it is the installer that is generating the error. I see no additional install steps, no additional files are generated.

Google says trackbar.mfx uses MFC classes.  It is possible that the program depends on a particular version of the MFC dll that my (older) machine does not have.  I don't have MMF installed either, if it matters.

If I'm the only one with the error, then I'd say don't worry about it.

Tourist