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darkFunction / darkFunction-Editor

A 2d sprite and animation studio for game developers
http://www.darkfunction.com/editor
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Feature Request: Exporting Animation Sheets/Sequences #14

Open Brian151 opened 9 years ago

Brian151 commented 9 years ago

gif exporting is only really useful for preview purposes, at best, and the color limitations of .gif also can essentially, destroy certain sprites...so even its preview capabilities are limited!

This program is pretty nice, but some more export options really are needed...badly. Not all engines or developers are going to support, or be willing to support the format this program uses, and you really should consider that.

Right now, I cannot do anything useful with my animations.

darkFunction commented 9 years ago

It exports as XML which you are free to convert to another format, or use directly in your game engine. The gif export is simply bonus functionality.

If you care to support other engines it's either a matter of updating the program to output the format or simply converting from XML, which is potentially the easier solution.

I appreciate this is frustrating but this is open source software provided completely for free and developed on my own time, I simply do not have the time or resources to support many different engine formats. Pull requests are very welcome!

Brian151 commented 9 years ago

the problem is besides parsing the XML, the parts then need to be rotated and such... Generally if someone wants to create an animation sheet for their animation, they want nothing to do with the code required to do so. (especially when it involves manipulating a bunch of smaller images) They might even lack that kind of experience...

animation sheets can be supported by nearly any engine, and the code to parse one is much, much easier to write than the code to parse and animate animations saved in your formats.

Seeing as you already have a live preview (that even scales/pans at user's whim, having your program export whatever is currently being rendered to a png image sequence or single png sprite sheet really shouldn't be that hard...

I understand this, but this is no small issue to be having with animating software. This is the kind of thing that almost certainly guarantees it would fail as a commercial product. Not to be threatening or rude, but yeah... unless the code, in the format/language they're using is already present for them to just import/copy/whatever , most developers are going to choose another option before they even consider using yet another file/data format. Even WITH that code just handed to them, they may still look for other solutions.