"Predator" - A Sprite Sheet Creator & Sprite Animation Editor

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"Predator" - A Sprite Sheet Creator & Sprite Animation Editor

(13 posts) (9 voices)

Started 6 months ago by Xcalllibur
Latest reply from diadem_lee

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Xcalllibur
Member

Hey everybody! I'm happy to announce the release of Predator, a new tool we have been working on for game developers. It lets you create sprite sheets from your sprite assets as well as turn those sprite frames into animations. You can then export the sprite sheet image along with the definition files to the game framework of your choice.

Where we are looking to differentiate our product from others out there is a streamlined UI experience that aligns to how you develop games, as well as support for all game frameworks out there. The first release has support for LibGDX and Cocos2D, but if you need support for another framework, please contact us with the details and we can usually write an exporter within a few days.

There is a basic edition of the program that is fully featured and FREE to use forever! We also have a professional edition that adds advanced layout options, including optimised sprite sheet layout

Right now for a limited time we are offering the professional edition for $15. We will be adding lots of features over the coming months and i will announce these changes on here as they happen. Please give it a go and give us your feedback, good or bad, so we can make this the best editor out there!

Try it out at http://spritesheeteditor.com/

-Louis Gale, Inverse Square Root Software

Posted 6 months ago #
ShaneT
Member

Can't you already do this for FREE?

I may be wrong?

Posted 6 months ago #
Birkemose
Moderator

You can get everything for free.
It all depends on your looks, and / or willingness to break the law.

Posted 6 months ago #
ShaneT
Member

I just use Zwoptex to do that and I don't think I broke any laws. :)

Posted 6 months ago #
Birkemose
Moderator

Well, just because you can get a free tool doing something, doesn't mean another tool doing the same thing isn't worth a price tag.
The problem in this case, that it seems to be a Windows tool, and I am not going down that path again. Ever.

Posted 6 months ago #
cybergreg
Member

Yup, IMO an EPIC FAIL -> Download Predator 1.0.0 (Windows XP / Vista / Windows 7)

I also don't consider any developer tool unless it runs on my Mac / OS X

@ Xcalllibur - I wish you good luck

Posted 6 months ago #
riq
Key Master

@Xcallibur Thanks for letting us know. A Mac version would be great for all of us, cocos2d-iphone users.

Posted 6 months ago #
summoner
Member

Thanks.
It's great as I usually work on Windows. Good luck

Posted 6 months ago #
Pawel
Member

I've bought Predator tool and spent yesterday creating animations for my game, just to find out today that animations are not being properly saved into plist file. The thing is that every frame under animation has a key name of "frame". Same key names are causing for parser to see only one frame - last one. Even plist editor on Mac "sees" one key, so every animation no matter how many frames it's seen as it would have only 1 frame! Names of the keys should have names like: "frame0", "frame1", "frame2" and so on, so they could be properly read.

I'm so frustraded since I've spent whole day creating animations and I can't even write a loader. I'll have to manually edit each plist file and give frame keys correct names.

I'm dissapointed since I've paid $15 for professional version just to find out that the tool isn't working properly. I thought that when developers decided to sell the tool at least they have tested it.

Posted 3 months ago #
Xcalllibur
Member

The main feature that people say sets us apart from other programs is the ability to create animations and sprite sheets in the one program.

We greatly appreciate all of you for the well wishes and letting us know that an OSX version of the program would be useful to you. It is interesting that despite this, the highest number of hits still comes from this forum! So i can only conclude there is a certain percentage of developers for cocos2d that are using Windows. For the benefit of those people, we have released several version since the original post, including a fix for the problem Pawel reported to us. Version 1.2 was released yesterday, the highlights of which are:

- Support for other frameworks, including Corona
- Numerous fixes, including tweaking the transparent pixel trimming
- An API that allows you to write your own custom exporters and export the sprite sheet definition files into any format that you want

Of course many of these changes are not useful to those who solely work with the cocos2d framework but were highly requested by other users. If you are interested and have any questions or feedback, please let us know through the contact page at spritesheeteditor.com/contact for the fastest response.

Posted 1 month ago #
Karl
Member

I'd be interested if there were a command line interface to it. My game has hundreds of sprites and animations, separated into directories that get converted to sprite sheets by a shell script build phase in Xcode.

Posted 1 month ago #
Xcalllibur
Member

@Karl, thanks for letting us know - that is on our roadmap for a release in the near future since its an easy feature to add.

Posted 1 month ago #
diadem_lee
Member

Interesting, but as others have commented it needs additional features to be useful to the Cocos2D community. Looks a lot like texturepacker, only with some sort of animation creation tool as well.

Currently I used command line texturepacker as a build step similar to Karl. Animation definitions are in separate plists that are maintained manually. So for me to even consider using this tool I would need:
OSX Support
Command Line tool

What would be really nice is if the animation tool included some sort of bone animation timeline creation tools.

Posted 1 month ago #

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