One might ask what I’ve been doing with all this time that is not spent releasing games or making posts. I would answer to one with, “That’s a fair question.” First off, the usual abandoned-blog answer – things really picked up at home / work / school. Which is true but also lame. So instead of excuses, I offer a screenshot…
It is developing!
What’s this?! I’m getting tired of rastor-based graphics (which are easy to animate through tweening or math) and it is tedious to make sprite sheets and map them to rectangles manually. Imagine an application that would create sprite sheets and XML-based animations. The process would go something like this -
- Create a new solution
- Import a sprite sheet (or an image sequence for you 3d render-ers out there)
- Draw some boxes on the sheet
- Click “Trim Frames,” to slim the rectangles to the minimal space requirements (removing white space in the frame by nudging up to the colored pixels)
- Click “Reorder Sprite Sheet,” and the image of the sprite sheet is rearranged to remove as much white space as possible while still including all frames. (This will make your Flash game download faster!)
- Save Sprite Sheet.
- Export Xml Schema — this will at first only support the Flash animation package I chose to use, but for the nerdy, this will be a public API which could be implemented to support (any?) another Xml-based animation package.
- ???
- Profit.
And the tool set is pluggable, so this application will do amazing things that I haven’t even considered yet!
It is still young: the above screenshot is after only two real days of development, but it might be ready if anyone is eager for a beta version…