Spriter Pro News

[h2]0.7.2[/h2]

[h2]Change Log[/h2]
Additions

• A system for optimizing 2D meshes attached to multiple bones by subdividing them in a way that minimizes vertices in non-deforming areas and maximizes triangles in curved areas, resulting in a smoother bend when the mesh is deformed by bones while also avoiding unnecessary vertices.
  
• Added keyboard shortcuts (1 and 2) to skip the time to the previous and next keyframes in animation mode
  

Hello everyone,

We hope you're having a wonderful holiday season! We just wanted to update you on the current state of Spriter 2 and what you can expect moving forward.

First, we released a new version last week, which included a large number of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes. Today's release mainly focuses on usability updates, including a new tooltip system to make it much easier to understand the ui and how to use all the features.

We're sorry for the delays in Spriter 2's development. We know it's been frustrating and we apologize for the wait. The latest big delay was due to a severe underestimation of the work required for a specific change to the way Spriter 2 handles bone deformation, and in order to prevent it from taking any longer, we rolled back the last several months of code, and continued from there. Those months weren't wasted. We learned a lot, and we'll reintroduce many of those changes gradually after you have a fully functional 1.0 in your hands.  

We've also identified the reasons for our history of inconsistent communication and releases.  We fell into a trap of wanting to make up for delayed releases by making sure each new release would be big enough to justify the wait, which inevitably compounded the delays and our wanting to make up for them, ad infinitum. This isn't an acceptable excuse, but we wanted to be transparent, and we've adjusted our internal practices to keep this from happening again in the future.

We're back on track and working towards the feature complete beta in the near future, and we're committed to regular releases and open communication going forward, regardless of the state of any particular build at release.

Thank you for your patience. We can't wait for you to see what we have in store.

Best regards,
lucid




[h2]0.7.1[/h2]

[h2]Change Log[/h2]
Additions

• Added tooltip window to help guide new users. Click the (!) icon at the top of the screen to toggle tooltip visibility
  
• Added ability to double-click a keyframe to jump to that time
  

Changes and Enhancements

• Made the help icon more visible
  
• Changed the wording on certain options to make them more clear
  

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where available armed tools wouldn't be current for the Alt-Shift-MouseWheel shortcut until the tool dropdown was manually clicked after switching modes
  
• Fixed a bug where the tool selection ui was visible on the title screen
  

Spriter 2 Update Build 0.7 is available.
We'll release another build and give you the details on what caused the delay before Christmas. Thanks for your patience.

[h2]0.7[/h2]

[h2]Change Log[/h2]
Additions

• Added scale to multi-select options (w/ optional resize from pivot (ctrl) and uniform scale (shift))
• Added arbitrary scale angle option to multi-select (right-click rotate
• Added rectangular marquee selection tool
• Added paint to select tool
• Added action and selection tool menus and indicators in the bottom right of screen
• Added shortcuts to navigate tool and selection menus without needing to directly click on menus (ctrl-shift mousewheel to switch current within current tool type or tab to switch between action and selection tool types)
• Added right click item in animation mode to objects to prevent a specific property from being keyed in that animation
• Added fall-off drag tool (soft drag)
• Added smudge drag tool (soft drag)
• Added contour mesh distortion (alt click along a line to add additional points. alt-click on a mesh to add a new contour. alt-clicking with a single contour end-point selected continues that contour
• Added right click item in animation mode to restore object selected properties to rig state
• Added right click item in animation mode to key or unkey specific properties
• Added double-click to select all control points of a mesh
• Added the ability to flip images on unconfirmed meshes
• Added the ability to see ghost images of swappable images when positioning unconfirmed mesh sprites
• Added transparency option for gif exports
• Added alpha channel transparency to png exports
• Added background color options for all exports
• Added ability to crop and pan export box and set export scale separately from window size
• Added button to crop export box to fit animation
• Added visual resizing and panning to export box
• Meshes can now be added to a single bone, even if the bone is in a chain

Changes and Enhancements

• Added gradient background for images in image picker dialogue for greater visibility of some sprites
• Switched to a native file browser for loading and saving
• Made it so you can switch images that are already deconfirmed
• Multiple areas of the programs optimized for increased speed and responsiveness
• Faster png sequence export
• Mesh deformers can be added to all selected meshes at once
• Added separate tool to spawn strokes (with tool selected, alt-click to spawn, shift-click to redraw the currently selected stroke
• Upgraded Unity Engine version for stability and performance improvements
• Now adds one pixel transparent border to images on import to avoid texture edge stretching
• Removed pin deformation (replaced and superseded by contour deformation)
• Zoom is now based on original image pixels (100% default zoom will display undistorted image meshes at exact pixel size)
• Made export dialog much more compact
• Export initially crops and pans to fit animation
• Meshes now start out as basic quads until deformers are introduced

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where double clicking an already confirmed mesh by mistake could affect future drag operations on control points unpredictably
• Fixed a bug where under certain circumstances changes to children weren't keyed correctly resulting in objects shifting after being moved
• Fixed bug where color picker would always initially open with color black selected
• Fixed a bug where incremental saves would fail for base filenames less than 5 characters in length
• Fixed a bug where all rigging points were visible after loading a project
• Fixed a bug where redoing creating a new mesh made it no longer drag-droppable in realtime in rigging mode
• Fixed bug where redoing creating a new mesh by dragging an image from file palette would flip the mesh
• Fixed multiple slowdown bugs that occured during ui updates
• Fixed multiple bugs where under certain circumstances if a UI element's animation was canceled part of the way through it could cause future animations to animate to the point where it was cutoff (resulting in smaller or half faded ui elements)
  
• Fixed a bug where under certain circumstances hidden points for unselected meshes would reappear when applying changes to unrelated objects
• Fixed a bug where sometimes a popup menu's enable animation would play twice
• Fixed a bug where under certain circumstances it was possible to break the positions of some popup menus resulting in them continuing to appear in the wrong spot for the remainder of the session
• Fixed a bug where hovering over the invisible deformer control lines of an unselected mesh would prevent a click from selecting the mesh
• Fixed a bug where hovering over the invisible deformer control lines of an unselected mesh would prevent the hover mesh glow effect from showing
• Fixed a bug where you could drag the invisible deformer control lines of an unselected mesh
• Fixed a bug where control points for mesh deformers wouldn't register hovers under certain circumstances
• Fixed a bug where the transform tool would restore back to zero degrees upon making a new selection
• Removed a bug where some superfluous wireframe generation operations during the triangulation would slightly reduce efficiency during the initial drag out of images
• Fixed a bug where cancelling too quickly after choosing new or load project would make the menu invisible
• Several general stability improvements to the rigging system
• Fixed a bug where after creating a multi-bone chain and adding a mesh, the cage control points wouldn't reappear when reselecting a bone
• Fixed a bug where attempting to drag and drop a mesh attached to multiple bones would start an unintended stroke drawing operation
  

Sorry for the long silence again. After our last update post, we realized a way to greatly enhance a fundamental feature. It seemed it'd be a quick update & we were holding off on posting until we had a concrete ETA, but it's taking longer than expected. More details upon release

Hello again, everyone! We're still hard at work on the next version. This will be a larger update than usual with over 30 new features and enhancements, and over 20 bug fixes so far. We look forward to showing you what we've been up to.