Feature Request: SpritePack zip/gif

Hi,

I started to play with my images and Codea, That was a few days ago.

I came up with new ideas for Codea. Don’t worry, I’ll not require heavy features.

Ok, Let’s not be afraid to talk about these features. These facilities are very important.

1. SpritePack zip/gif:

I have over 500 images for commercial use: UI elements, icons, etc. + Animations, non gif: 000.png to 100.png. Believe me! I think I will hurt/broke my iPad if I will try to import all my images into Codea.

But it’s not just about this problem, I will lose my youth to import all my images. So, I proposed facility to import images from an archive, but also with display retina optimization.

Another proposal is the ability to import GIF animations.

2. Sound wav/mp3:

The problem with the sound is similar to importing images. If you solved the problem with importing images, You (the author of Codea) you have a single step, the sound. Life without color is like winter without snow, so, Codea without sounds is like Codea without images.

Believe me! I know what I say. I’m not deaf, I can hear sounds around me. So, As usual, I suggest to adding the ability to import sounds in Codea.

3. Preloader:

This is the easy part. I created a little game that has some large files.

It’s about files for levels. When I pressed the play button, black screen appears and then after some seconds game began. I do not know, because I have not tested, yet. I do not know if the game also loads heavy after is converted with XCode. The solution? Customizable Preloader.

Have a wonderful day!

On 1: importing/exporting sprite packs is something I’ve already brought up before (with suggestions on how to implement it), but it sounds like it is not a priority at the moment, and it will be a good bit of work, so it will probably be a while yet before we get this.

On 2: I agree, it would be great to be able to import and play sounds. Again, I think this has the same problem as #1: A)it’s not a priority at the moment, B) there’s currently no way to play sound, so they’d have to implement that, and 4) they’d have to design and implement the interface for importing (and possibly exporting) sounds (like SoundPacks or something)

On 3: This would be really sweet. At the very least, just the ability to load textures into the texture cache without having to draw them would be great. Maybe have a load(…, callback) function (where … is either a list of sprite names, or the first arg is a table of sprite names) that loads the texture(s) in the background and calls back to a function (with the method signature callback(numLoaded, total) when each one is loaded. This way we could even implement animated loading screens/progress bars while the textures are loading.

As an overview of my thoughts:


function setup()
	local textures = 
	{
		"MySprite1",
		"MySprite2",
		"MySprite3",
		"MySprite4",
	}
	
	loadingProgress = 0	
	loadtexture(textures, textureLoaded)
	-- or
	--loadTexture("MySprite1", "MySprite2", "MySprite3", "MySprite4", textureLoaded)
end

function textureLoaded(numLoaded, total)
	-- we can use this for a loading bar or animation
	loadingProgress = numLoaded / total

	if loadingProgress == 1 then
		-- we're finished loading!
		startGame()
	end
end

function draw()
	 if loadingProgress < 1 then
	 	updateLoadingAnimation(progress)
	 else
	 	updateGame()
	 end
end

OK! I am interested in only one feature.

I will repeat:

I have over 500 images for commercial use: UI elements, icons, etc. + Animations, non gif: 000.png to 100.png. Believe me! I think I will hurt/broke my iPad if I will try to import all my images into Codea.

But it’s not just about this problem, I will lose my youth to import all my images. So, I proposed facility to import images from an archive, but also with display retina optimization.

Another proposal is the ability to import GIF animations.

I want to talk only about SpritePack zip/gif - What do you think?

You do know that you can currently make your own spritepack, right? You just have to use iExplorer to navigate into the Codea folder where the spritepacks are located and make a new folder called whatever.spritepack. Then copy a plist out of one of the other spritepacks and update it, and then copy all of your hundreds of commercial images in. Done in 5 minutes, hardly any youth lost.

Also, animated gifts are probably a bad idea. I suggest you make a spritesheet with each frame and create your own code to animate it.

To import 100 images with Codea, I lost 1h

Thanks Vega! I will try to use iExplorer.