Tuesday, January 11, 2011

SWFSheet – create sprite sheets from SWFs

SWFSheet – create sprite sheets from SWFs:

SWFSheet is a program I created in most of a day back in late December. I finally polished it up this week and it’s now ready for release. The idea is to take an animation created in Flash, and generate a sprite sheet from it. A sprite sheet, for those of you who may not be familiar, is a single large bitmap containing several frames of an animation, usually layed out in a grid. These can be loaded in very efficiently by games, and each frame shown to recreate the animation.

I had the idea for this program while attempting to port some Flash stuff to the iPhone. And later while making other mobile games, I found that Flash was still the best tool to create animations. It has a powerful time line, easy to use drawing tools, tweens, 3D, and of course, powerful scripting with ActionScript. However, getting a nice looking Flash animation into a sprite sheet that could be used with cocos2d on the iPhone/iPad or with XNA for Windows Phone 7 was not so easy. I did it by hand a couple of times, and it wasn’t very fun. Thus, SWFSheet was born.

SWFSheet is an AIR application and has been tested on Windows and Mac. You create your SWF however you want. Flash CS5 or earlier, Flash Builder, or anything else that outputs a SWF. It doesn’t matter how it’s created. Then you load the SWF into SWFSheet [...]

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