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Sinister Design3 years ago

Really awesome program! There are some big problems with being able to actually export PNG spritesheets, though:

  1. the "loop" frames on exported sprite sheets are placed at the very beginning. This offsets the other frames such that the animation no longer actually starts on its intended frame 0. This requires burdensome hand-editing to fix.
  2. it doesn't remember the last selected frames per row. I would suggest making it auto-calculate frames per row that gets it at close as possible to a square with height and width that are each a power of 2 (thus making the resulting spritesheet more performant for use in games).
  3. Most importantly, it just doesn't actually work on my computer--like, at all. It throws the error "Failed to save spritesheet as [directory and name]; Access is denied (os error 5)." The program throws this error regardless of which directory I select for it to export to. Even just exporting directly to C: is too much, apparently. The executable itself has Read and Write permissions, so I'm not sure what's going on here. (I am running Windows 10 Home build 19041.867.)
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bauxite3 years ago (1 edit)

About 1 and 2: I'll look into it.

About 3: have you tried:

  • Disabling your virus scanner? (if you have one)
  • Exporting to your own Users folder, e.g. C:/Users/[your name here]/? (to avoid permission issues)
  • Does loading sprites work as expected? E.g. do loading gifs/spritesheets/individual frames all work correctly?
  • Checking the log file? (in the folder where you stored Bitmapflow should be a log file called "bitmapflow.log", can you post its content here?)
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Sinister Design3 years ago(+1)

Thanks for the response--setting an exception in Avast fixed issue #3! :D

While I'm here, I have a few more bits of feedback for you that will dramatically improve peoples' workflow using this program:

  • in the load spritesheet window, the program should auto-calculate the likely frame width by dividing spritesheet width by frames per row. Making the user calculate this and fill in this field in by hand every time seems like an unnecessary inconvenience. (This won't work with packed spritesheets, of course, but a developer would probably want to process their animations before packing anyway.)
  • in the load spritesheet window, the program would benefit from a Total rows field below Frames per row. This would allow the program to auto-calculate the likely frame height by dividing spritesheet height by the total number of rows, thereby saving the user the annoyance of checking the spritesheet height and dividing by hand.
  • spritesheets oftentimes contain more than one animation on them. Since the algorithm is only meant to blend between frames of a single animation, this means a given spritesheet may to be loaded multiple times; and because the program doesn't remember the values last input when loading a spritesheet, the user has to input them by hand over and over. To fix this, the program should probably just remember the values last used when loading a spritesheet.
  • when loading a spritesheet, the program should probably remember the filename of the loaded spritesheet and--when going to Export spritesheet--fill that same filename in by default rather than making the user type it (or a variant of it) out in full every time.
  • the increase/decrease arrow buttons to the right of the FPS text field don't respond to clicks.

Thanks for a great program; I look forward to seeing it develop further!

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bauxite3 years ago

Thanks for the great feedback! I'll be sure to write it all down.

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