Scratch

Hey lucid,

I'm not the most experienced person with the Scratch Squeak VM but since no one else has replied yet I'll give you an answer.

Because Scratch isn't an animation tool, it doesn't store frames. Mostly animations done in it are scripted using waits and costume changes. In the Scratch "project summary" output, the X-position, Y-position, size, costume number etc will be stored as they were when the project was saved and the scripts that tell them where to move at what times are there also, written in semi-pseudo-code. However, without frames, I see turning this information into frames for an animation as very difficult.

It is, of course, possible to use a variable called "frame" that changes once every whatever your framerate is, and the other sprite reading the framerate to decide where they should be and how they should look but most people don't do this because it's more complicated than it needs to be. I mostly use it if I'm exporting images of an animation frame-by-frame.

Scratch doesn't have XML support in its outputs so in short, I don't think that compatiability is possible, or if it is, it'll take a lot of work with a middle-man program converting everything around.

However, as I said, I'm not the absolute expert here, so there may be a way I don't know about. I will contact nXIII, a fellow Scratcher who is probably the best person for your answer 

Hi Lucid,

Scratch would probably be able to read in an XML file and position images at a specific point for a specific duration, based on the XML file. The best way in my opinion would be to create a Scratch Patch which simply adds a menu item saying "Import Spriter project..." and decompiles the XML into a Scratch project by adding sprites and scripts.

However, it seems like too much work for something which is quite obvious to do in Scratch itself. So a better way would be to import a list (Scratch uses 1-dimensional arrays called lists) and create a project which follows the instructions in the lists. Simple, graceful, and quite cool. The problem there is that Scratch only supports images added into the resources pack manually. So it's not feasible to actually build an image on the spot at a reasonable speed. So, you would have to add each image as a costume, and reference each costume with the XML item.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure he wants a viewer, not an editor. Read the website for more info. 

Hardmath123 wrote:

Yeah, I'm pretty sure he wants a viewer, not an editor. Read the website for more info. 

Lucid, are you able to save the animation as an animated gif?
If so, you can import all the costumes of an animated gif into a sprite at once, and display would most likely work in scratch.

Last edited by LiquidMetal (2012-04-03 09:01:15)

sparks wrote:

LiquidMetal is right, dragging an animated GIF into Scratch will turn each frame into a costume for easy playback, though it's not a very efficient method, as a lot of images have to be loaded.

In my experience, loading gifs with lots of images has been slow (I think because of Squeak? - and showing each in the costumes tab).  I also had some trouble with certain gif-exporting-programs, where once imported into scratch, any black part of those gifs would become transparent (That may have been a save options error on my part).    However, Scratch 2.0 is due before the year is out, and both of those problems may be fixed.

sparks wrote:

Scratch is a platform.

Oh! I didn't realize programming languages count. Thanks.

Last edited by LiquidMetal (2012-04-03 13:13:54)

lucid wrote:

So it seems it's possible.  Part two of this question, is whether, based on the difficulty involved, and the number of users in the community proficient enough to attempt it, what do you think is the likelihood of someone taking the time to do it, once we release the file format.

Yes, I reckon this is certainly possible to play animations from a set format in Scratch.

I wouldn't mind having a go or working on it with some other people, though I will have to see what my schedule is like when you release!

I think that a patch is a good option. However, I think that a project would have to be block-scripted to work and would have to load all the data first, reading from the file live to play the animation would probably be too slow.

What you really need is image importing, sprite cloning and file reading. Panther actually has all these things and I think creating the animation player in that would be very easy, but I assume you specifically want to target Scratch.

The question is, then, if Panther is a version of Scratch, would using a patch be defeating the objectives of your project? Scratch is a sandboxed scripting language, so without patching it, a lot of the importing would have to be done by hand.

Have you any rough drafts of the format we could look at? Would the settings of every sprite be determined once per frame?
_________________________________________________________________________________

I've just been watching your video and the program looks pretty good! I'm an indie gamer studying game development at university at the moment and it looks like a truly useful tool!

Having watched the video I feel I should give a few warnings:

I notice you showcased parent-child sprites for "mannequin" characters as one of your main selling points. Scratch does not support sprite nesting or inheritance so you will need to include full position, direction etc. for each part in your output document rather than a parent name an relative positioning.

You mentioned above that you're aiming to create fluid animations across platform and whilst I agree that Spriter will make the development and animation process faster, I'm not confident that the method Scratch would use to READ the animation data and play it would be as smooth as directly animating in Scratch unless one of us can work out how to write a script to write scripts in Scratch (It's not very fast at reading from its array database).

I also hope that a free version will be available since the vast majority of Scratchers are young people without the money to buy such a tool.

Last edited by sparks (2012-04-03 16:03:39)

LiquidMetal wrote:

Also, the scratch screen is currently set at 480*360 pixels: What would you do about larger sizes of animation?

Scratch just resizes it. I draw in 800x600 and it fits the screen perfectly.

MrScoop wrote:

LiquidMetal wrote:

Also, the scratch screen is currently set at 480*360 pixels: What would you do about larger sizes of animation?

Scratch just resizes it. I draw in 800x600 and it fits the screen perfectly.

If I understand correctly, lucid wants there to be separate sprites for separate pieces of the animation, so that they will take up less space.  If each sprite is less then 480*360; they will not auto-resize, and then the animation will not fit on the screen... And the X and Y values would need to be scaled also for the animation.

sparks wrote:

Yes, it resizes, but not only does it do it with a lot of image quality loss, it hasn't increased the size of the stage, so coordinates for an animation will either have to remain in a 480*360 rectangle or be scaled.

Scratch 2.0's vector graphics capability should help fix the image quality problem.
If, lucid, spriter will also have vector graphics support?

It means that you can't re-size 800 * 600? Or if you re-size pixel splits. There must be some alternative out there for same. Isn't?

hi, lucid, Zeroluck and i are building a scratch-like program in Java called JBlocks and we were wondering if you would like us to try and implement opening and saving spriter projects. If so please reply to this thread and we will try incorporate this into JBlocks.

hi, sorry, lot of forums to keep track of, and I don't always remember to bookmark them.  I responded to TRocket on the kickstarter page,  JBlocks looks awesome, btw.