Texturepacker import?

Hi there,

A'llo, welcome to the Visionaire Studio community.

You have 3 choices for animations.

1. export single frames (png or webp) format from your image editing / 3D software application & import them frame by frame or animation by animation (each file in an animation needs to have the same name & then have a number prefix on the end, for example: name_1, name_2 or name_001, name_002 or name_(1), name_(2), etc. Also it doesn't matter if some numbers are missing as it will import all with the same name in order based on the prefix number).

2. Spine spritepart animations. Simon has been working on making it a little more flexible for the upcoming release (I believe runtime support for swapping out spriteparts & other things on the fly via Lua script). It's a shame Spriter runtime isn't integrated into the engine (maybe Simon will consider adding it at some point) as Spine is somewhat pricey in comparison to Spriter & Spriter Pro can be bought at the minute for $1 in the current humble dev bundle whatsit.

3. 3D. It's buggy in the current version & I'm afraid I can't give out any details on it as it's a feature I haven't used & probably won't ever use.

P.S: I believe Simon was working on normal / depth maps for the upcoming update of Visionaire Studio. There's some other stuff as well I think, such as physics engine - but don't hold me on that as it's just stuff I'm recalling from past conversations with Simon.

P.P.S: here's some information I wrote up a while back on the characters tab. There's some screenshots with notes detailing the walk system.

I do not understand the purpose of tools like TexturePacker. Single PNG files are small. Combine them to a huge file brings no advantages. No need to save some bytes with special compression algorithms for images.... choosing optimized compression algorithms for audio is a better way to reduce data

I do not understand the purpose of tools like TexturePacker. Single PNG files are small. Combine them to a huge file brings no advantages. No need to save some bytes with special compression algorithms for images.... choosing optimized compression algorithms for audio is a better way to reduce data

Programs like TexturePacker become handy when using several images which could also be build together like tetris blocks to reduce unused space. Its sometimes handier to have one image which is bigger instead of several small ones.

I do not understand the purpose of tools like TexturePacker. Single PNG files are small. Combine them to a huge file brings no advantages. No need to save some bytes with special compression algorithms for images.... choosing optimized compression algorithms for audio is a better way to reduce data

It's not entirely about disk space.  It's also about your RAM and stuff like look-up operations.  6 256x256 graphics assets take up a lot more space in RAM than 1 256x1024 texture.  That's also 5 less texture objects you're managing, 5 less textures to find on the HDD and load [esp. if your asset loading for these textures is single-threaded], and so on.

A'llo, welcome to the Visionaire Studio community.

You have 3 choices for animations.

Thanks for the welcome, and your information. That sounds reasonable, and I already was able to add my walking cycles using 8 single sprites - works great. I bought Spriter, and had a licence of Texturepacker long before starting coding with Unity - they implemented their own packing to sprite atlas' this year (?). But I have avoided Spine so far because of the price (it's at $ 69,99 atm).

I do not understand the purpose of tools like TexturePacker. Single PNG files are small. Combine them to a huge file brings no advantages. No need to save some bytes with special compression algorithms for images.... choosing optimized compression algorithms for audio is a better way to reduce data

When coding for iOS or Android, you must creature texture atlasses because the current graphics chips are optimized for images in 2048x2048 or 4096x4096, and heavily reduce draw calls when drawing a lot of sprites. In Unity, I always put as many sprites of a level into one png as possible to

by joerg-burbach Friday, 30. December, 17:48

Thanks for the welcome, and your information. That sounds reasonable, and I already was able to add my walking cycles using 8 single sprites - works great. I bought Spriter, and had a licence of Texturepacker long before starting coding with Unity - they implemented their own packing to sprite atlas' this year (?). But I have avoided Spine so far because of the price (it's at $ 69,99 atm).

Aye, the $69.99 license for Spine is only for the basic essentials edition which is just the basics. It's about $300 for the pro edition with the meshes/mesh warping & kinetic stuff amongst other things. It's way too pricey for me. Hell, I paid $99 for Articy Draft + articy 2 dlc during one of the Steam sales & that was too expensive for me too, but I wanted something decent for planning stuff with rather than relying on cloud mapping apps, online task managers & open office - too many things for me to keep track of.

Anyway, I hope Spine ends up in one of the humble software bundles at some point or that Simon considers adding the runtime library for Spriter - though not sure if that would create conflict of interest with Spine runtime library...

P.S: I recommend checking out the A Few Tips... section of the manual on the wiki site. I wrote up a few useful things regarding images & optimizing your games with Visionaire Studio. Some things may reduce VRAM, such as reducing the amount of frames you use (i.e: by not using duplicate frames to control duration of an animation or by using duplicated frames in reverse for creating a pendulum type of animation that plays forwards & backwards or vice versa in a loop). A Lot of tricks can be done by manually setting the delay time between each frame (how long a frame should be displayed for) or by inserting Lua script into animation frames themselves.

Also I recommend using webp format for the images you import into VS. They won't reduce VRAM, but they will decrease loading times due to the file-sizes being a lot smaller than the png counterparts. Anyway, check out the image encoding & game optimization pages - I'm sure you'll find them useful.

What about Anime Studio (Moho)? This is one of the most popular Animation tools....
http://my.smithmicro.com/anime-studio-2D-animation-software....

What about Anime Studio (Moho)? This is one of the most popular Animation tools....
http://my.smithmicro.com/anime-studio-2D-animation-software....

Looks a lot different from when I tried it. Debut price is reasonable, but the pro license is around about the same price as Spine & it's the features in pro version that are the ones that are most useful, such as the mesh warping feature.

$267.99 on sale for pro version until 3rd January & then back to $399 RRP. It's a lot of money either way.

But I think: as long as Visionaire is not able to handle key frame animations, the import of various animation file formats is not worth discussing.

PS: It seems there is an universal exchange file format for 2D and 3D animations named fbx:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XZ3S6ZGrsw

But I think: as long as Visionaire is not able to handle key frame animations, the import of various animation file formats is not worth discussing.

PS: It seems there is an universal exchange file format for 2D and 3D animations named fbx:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XZ3S6ZGrsw

Isn't that the point of the Spine runtime library? Technically VS already has keyframe animation built into the regular animations as you can select a frame, click on the edit button & from that apply a sound fx or add some custom action parts or Lua script to it - at least I believe in a way that, that's similar to how keyframe works, no? I've messed around with Adobe After Effects before & that uses keyframes & all that did as far as I remember was to allow me to adjust parameters & trigger new things/kill existing things, etc.