I swear: every application I ever develop in my future will support plugins.
Another teaser for the animation application I’m working on. The image below is a screen shot of the app in action. It shows a sprite sheet (a single flat image) and there are black rectangles drawn. Each rectangle is a frame. These rectangles were drawn using the Add Frame tool, and I created the frames in an abnormal way — there are two frames that include two shark images — to better indicate how the shrinking tool operates.
Some unoptimized frames
Once the frames are layed out roughly (or at any point really after 1 frame is created) I executed the Shrink Rectangles action which produced the below image. The green boxes illustrate the change in frame size — all of the empty white rows and columns of pixels have been removed from the frames. The one that is outlined in red I selected to show a resized frame without the green deltas.
The rectangles - they have shrunk!
Final result of the resize
Finally, the next tool — to be programmed tomorrow — will take frames (whether optimized as demo’d above or not) and produce a new sprite sheet with as much white space removed as mathematically possible through a rectangular packing algorithm.