Sprite Replacement

[artician]

I've been working on a prototype with placeholder graphics for some time. It's time to swap out those placeholders for the actual sprites that will be seen in the game. I thought this would be as simple (ha) as importing the new sprites over the old sprites animation, and the hotspot/action point info would automatically apply to the new graphic, however when I import the new sprite data it just comes in as new frames with default settings.

Is there a way to import the finished artwork and have it simply replace the existing frames? I'm up to several-thousand frames here, and just thinking about doing that over and over again, and then 8 more times (for each playable character), is going to send me into a coma.

Any help is appreciated.

[DavidN]

Hmm... how are you importing them? Copy-pasting them into the frames themselves or through the Import (open folder icon) button on the animation editor?

If it's any help at all, you can hold down the Alt key to change the hot spot/action point for all frames of an animation at once.

[RayMarble]

I`m very interested in this topic too + I already ranted at length in forums about this.

My research didn`t produce any results (ie I think it can`t be done the normal way - my mind just refuses to accept the possibility that this software doesn`t support concept of placeholders).

I was even thinking of loading the graphics upon the start of application since I have a frame for initializing all the things anyway (loading arrays, checking savegames etc) so my first idea was to put something like

.Start of frame:
=PlayerActiveObj/Load frame (and do this for all the directions and objects. It`s a desperate plan I know.)

but the problem is, it doesn`t support box mode of importing the graphics and the hotspot and action point can`t be manipulated other than setting their starting position.

...

The closest thing I can think of is to have all the animations saved in box mode and import them from the MMF`s graphic editor so at least you won`t have to reposition all the hotspots and action points in case you move them around. The downside is that the box mode can be a huge hassle and you still have to import them manually for every direction.

[RayMarble]

Hmm... how are you importing them? Copy-pasting them into the frames themselves or through the Import (open folder icon) button on the animation editor?

If it's any help at all, you can hold down the Alt key to change the hot spot/action point for all frames of an animation at once.

It`s not a problem if there are just a few frames that need to be replaced, but when the time comes to replace the placeholders you can`t really copy/paste every frame individually (which is the only way to preserve the hotspots / action points unless you use box mode).

I really wish there were some support for linking external files Illustrator / InDesign style.

[artician]

Wow, the Alt-Move hotspot/action point feature is super helpful. Before I was doing them one at a time. Very nice, thank you.

I also found that if I select my existing frames and click import, I can import the new art over the top of the placeholder frames and it *will* retain the hotspot/action point settings.

I also wish there was a much easier way to handle this, but these couple features do make it 10x better than what I was afraid I was going to have to do. I still have to manually place my action-point for where the characters hand is, but otherwise I can deal with this for now.

Thank you all!

[RayMarble]

Oh wow selecting frames before importing is super useful!
Didn`t know about that one :-)
Thanks!

[artician]

I was wrong about one thing though, importing over the top of an existing frame of animation does NOT retain the hotspot placement.

Am I wrong about this? At first I thought it did. Is there some way to update a sprites animation without losing that data?

Thanks again folks.

[RayMarble]

So it doesn`t retain them after all? I can`t check it right away but if it doesn`t then indeed using box mode is the closest I can think of.

[artician]

I could never get box mode working!

[RayMarble]

The Help file has some pretty solid info, also there`s RayLax`s article about how to use it.

Definitely not as nice as having linked graphics that update automatically would be but still better than importing everything manually I guess.