Spriter import - support for fluid 2D animations

General
1

Hi everyone,

I’ve been investigating a new animation tool that was recently funded on Kickstarter, called Spriter (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/539087245/spriter). I noticed that someone created an importer for love2d and made the code public (https://github.com/capmar/spriter-love2d), so I ported it over. It works surprisingly well. In order to run the example I had to get all the images and import them via dropbox. Once 1.4 is approved I’ll release the code (which isn’t much different from the original) so people can play with it.

The tool is currently in beta and anyone can download it and create their own animations.

Also here’s a video of it running the example character:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aHizFx8Fe8

2

That is cool!

3

So awesome, be amazing to have this!

4

I’ve seen spriter mentioned before with reference to other Lua frameworks - it has the potential to become one of the most useful tools in the developers arsenal and I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on it.

Having spriter for support for Codea (especially native, built in support) would be just increasing the awesome by a factor of 10 :slight_smile:

5

That’s really cool ! I had been working on this stuff a little while ago after I fell in love with the smooth animations you gets from Mika Mobile games)

It makes making art so easy (the art I use here is borrowed from Heroes vs Monsters though)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFTtwgEZvcg

I remember how I hated sprite sheets for character animation… They should only be used for effects (explosions and such).

This will be a very nice addition to Codea :smiley:

Cheers,

Xavier

6

Cool but not this for mac?

7

Nice stuff @Xavier, I’m guessing that is procedural animation?

@Juanjo56, hopefully a mac version will come out soon as they far exceeded their Kickstarter funding goal, and stated they would do a mac version.

8

I’m also looking forward to the skinning options, it reminds me of the arms on the Space Crab demo (was it part of Crabitron - how’s development of that progressing - is it halted whilst everyone rag’s on you about Codea updates? :slight_smile: )

9

Crabitron is still in-development and hopefully will hit the app store in a few short months. The crab arms actually use a combination of bezier curves, IK and vertex blending to get the effect.

Codea certainly takes up time since it has been quite a success and we want to support the community as much as possible.

10

@Xavier that animation is great! How did u do it in Codea?

11

Nice!

12

@John - Well I really don’t know what it is :stuck_out_tongue: I just wanted to do smooth sprite animations and figured out a most certainly wrong way to do it.
I really wanted to make a full game but the lack of audio file sound support made me drop the project. It’s still an issue for me but I plan on working on it again using the Codea runtime.

@Badge - Well I have a character class that calls the different animations of its body parts (shadow, left and right foot, body, head, eyes, left and right arm, weapon) based on what its doing (here you can only see “idle” and “move”)

The “body parts” are made using a “model” class.
This class has quite a lot of stuff in it, such as original position and rotation, delta position and rotation (for looping animation), the actual animations, special animations frequency (sword strike, shield, eye blink, cough, twinkle on weapons, etc…).

When i create a foot for example, i only specify it’s type (so the class knows where to position it), it’s image source, and its animation type.

Let’s say I move the stick, I call toon:setMove() and the character class then sets its different body parts to “move animation”. When I stop, I call toon:setIdle() it sets the body parts to “idle animation”…

The animations I use are made using basic sin/cos functions, and animation updates are framerate independant.
I start losing the 60 fps cap with 20 toons on screen, but i haven’t really optimized it.
But then again the game I wanted has 12 creatures on screen at max, so I’m fine.

Cheers,

Xavier

13

Thanks for the insight Xavier :slight_smile:
One last question - how did you bring in the images themselves? These aren’t from Spritely, so do you have the 1.4 version of Codea? If not, how have you wrapped them into the Lua file?

14

@Badger - nonon, I made a custom spritepack using iExplorer

more info on that here: http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/Talk/discussion/21/spritepack-fun/p1

15

@Xavier - gotcha :slight_smile: thanks for the link to the discussion - didn’t realise you could do that! Very exciting :slight_smile:

16

Hey, @John, did you ever post the Spriter importer mentioned here? I thought about porting it myself, but why reinvent the wheel? I’d love to play with it if you have it complete.