The VG Resource

Hi everyone. First of all, let me apologize my first post here beeing kind of an ad for an app I've been and still am working on. But you will maybe forgive me, if I told you that I do not get any revenue from SpriteStudio (the app is free, and there's no ad in it). It's basically a sideproject I started while working on a 2D Space-Strategy-Game for android.

Well, why am I posting here?

You guys obviously are experts in spriting and you do exactly know what an app needs to be a good spriting program. If I could get just a few of you guys to try out my app and give me a little feedback, this would allow me to improve my app according to you needs (and so, together, we can make a great spriting app).

SpriteStudio is currently at alpha stage and is available here:

SpriteStudio on Google Play

In order to give you guys a quick introduction to the app, I've made a little introduction video:



Also you should know about the features I'm already working on:

- Layers
- Freely choosable background color (atm is fixed to white)
- OnionSkin- Mode and Animation preview
- Automatic Spritemap packing with xml-reference
- Level- Editor (?! - Not sure about that yet)
- New tools (Mirrormode for pencil etc., Copy tool, Selection, Shapes, etc.)
- Supporting Image formats like xcf for seamless Desktop<->Tablet<->Phone exchange

I would be very happy for any feedback I get and let me say that again: This is a non-profit-project.

I'm not a spriter nor do I have an Android but that still looks pretty cool. However maybe a mod should move this to Games Development (since that's used fo development in general)?

I can't try it as my Android is out for repair, but If I don't forget it I'll check it out once it's back.

As for suggestions, a palette panel would be nice with a bar at one of the sides you can draw out (like the android system bar) so have you quick access to your colors. .PAL support would be great then, too.

Thanks a lot!

@puggsoy: Sorry, really wasn't sure where to post this, so I thought general discussion would be the place to start.

@previous: Palette! Thanks a lot! Had this on my feature-list when I started work on SpriteStudio but completely forgot it. Sure that's something I wont be missing. PAL Support, ok, I'm going to have a closer look at the file format. Is this the most commonly used format for sprites?

Ok got it, so .PAL is a file format to store palette data right? Ok, hopefully there's an in-depth documentation of this format somewhere, otherwise this won't be possible.

Is it sufficient to provide RGBA, HSVA and HEX- Colorpickers in order to make your own palettes or are there useful utilities that should be implemented?

I don't know how other people pick their colors, I usually just type in values for HSV. I rarely use alpha.



There are actually two .PAL formats, the Microsoft one ans JASC, both supported by different programs. GraphicsGale and GIMP read JASC, for example, I'm not sure about MS Pals (except that VBA exports them and I think PS can save them, too).

The JASC Palette format is quite simple. They're plain text files. First line is "JASC_PAL", second line is "0100" (format version), third line is number of colours (should be "16" or "256" I heard, some programs might support ofther numbers). Then come the colors, each in a separate line as RGB values (like "127 127 255", "0 0 0"...).

MS Pals are more complicated. Four bytes for the identifier "RIFF", four bytes for the file length, eight bytes "PAL data", four bytes for the data size (usually file size - 0x20 bytes (header)), 2 bytes for the version number (usually 0x0003). Now two bytes for the color count (usually 0x0001 -> 256 (little endian!)). Then there should be four bytes per color in ABGR (again, little endian; if you read as big endian, it's RGBA). I don't think A is actually used, though.

I think that above all else the swapping of colours is the most important thing to improve upon - seems to be a bit of a hassle. MAybe set up some pre-set boxes at the bottom with the last colours used, as well as setting the sliders as the default menu when going to select a new colour.

I'll be sure to check it out if I remember later when I'm out of the office.

If you don't mind me asking, will this be ported to the Apple app store or will it remain exclusively on the Android Market?

For the moment I'very busy getting all the bugs fixed in this app. I have not done any App for iOS so unfortunately, my answer is: Not in the near future.

@Previous

Hey, took a day off from programming today, but I will add palette support tomorrow, as well as importing palettes through pal files.

Your post about the PAL file format is very useful, thanks for that. However, do you maybe know where I could possibly find a complete documentation of the file format? It's not that I do not trust your post, but I'm not feeling very comfortable not having read the file format documentation.
Seems like a documentation is quite hard to find...

Thanks in advance! Your post has already been very useful.

This looks nifty.
And rather convinient consodering im on an android tablet right now.

I think i'll give it a download and try it out

I'm sorry, but I couldn't find anything either which is why I just wrote down what I knew while re-checking with a few files I had at hand. There's a bunch of code snippets to be found on google, though. I think there's no official documentation to be found because probably neither Corel (JASC-PAL) nor Microsoft (RIFF) ever published any. For RIFF, all I could find was the general structure of the "Resources Interchange File Format", but nothing about the palette variation.

I just tried it out on my phone, and within 5 minutes of using it the program crashed.
Just a simple message popped up saying "an unexpected error has occured" and such.

I'd also like to note that when I used it to lay out a free-form sketch (kind of just drawing/sketching) the sprite out, the lines broke often and left gaps, similar to this:
I've noticed you know there are bugs, I just figured I'd point these out in case they haven't happened before.
(I'm using Samsung Captivate Glide)

@Baegal:

Thanks for the report, thats pretty terrible! Have you sent me the error report when the bug popped up?
If not: What device are you using? What ROM is installed? Custom ROM? Did you have a feeling that the error happened after an interaction or just randomly?

Would be great, if you could answer these questions. Thanks in advance.

@Previous:

Thanks so much for having searched. I will definitely have a look on some PAL-loader-implementations.

I'm warning you ahead of time, I don't really know much about how this works, so I'll explain it to the best of my ability :I

The app closed before I could take a screenshot or send a report. It appeared like it stopped responding, gave me the message, and closed. I'm using a samsung captivate glide (SAMSUNG-SGH-1927) on Android 2.3.6 (Build # is GINGERBREAD.UCKL1)
I opened up the app, started to freeform draw (which created some broken lines like above), zoomed in, and once I tried working pixel by pixel, it said that "an unexpected error has occured", and proceeded to close.

I hope this helps :U