Jonny D wrote:
It’s looking pretty good! ?Good luck with the project and getting the funding it needs.
Do you have any information comparing it directly to Spine and/or Spriter as far as features, workflow, and platforms?
Jonny D
Thank you for your encouragement 
Feel free to spread the word! I can give some comparisons a shot. First I must say both Spriter and Spine are pretty nice tools - their creators have put a lot of hard, well thought-out work into them.
Features are interesting to compare because we approach problems in different ways. I can say at least they are cross platform whereas our runtimes can work anywhere, but our tool is currently Windows only. We decided to make the software full featured and stable first, then port (it won’t be too hard - but we have to be careful how we allocate our time right now).
We do feature a couple things which you won’t find anywhere else, yet. We feature the tails bone type, letting you bend a single texture quite naturally for things such as tails (of course), feet, rope, or necks, snakes, tentacles, etc. We also feature a repeat function which allows one to repeat any command that makes sense across multiple frames and animations, saving an enormous amount of work when tweaking things. Both of these are WIP (thus the kickstarter), but we have enough implemented to demonstrate. Texture autodetection, packing (Spine just got this), and our IK + locking solution are also a bit ahead of the pack, in our biased opinion. Again we are finessing and working the kinks out of these, which is why we need public interaction and feedback, as well as support.
Workflow is even harder because, again, we are doing things a bit differently. Take Spine’s dope sheet. It’s a common tool in animation. We can display individual bone and bone parameters a number of ways. We are trying a method which makes each key frame a visible “item”. Perhaps one day you can switch between multiple view types. The nice thing about this, is when it is complete, you will be able to edit the interpolation curves in line and move items around in a way that is just as natural, and possibly more so, as the dope sheet view.
I hesitate to do this comparison-style, so I will just say how easy it is to build an animation.
- Load an image with some “body parts”. Textures are autodetected, and it may not handle every case but we’ve not had a problem yet. Naturally community feedback will help.
- Go to build mode. Drag your textures in, align them into place (using a background reference image if desired), drag bones (which were automatically created) together to connect/parent skeleton. Use ctrl+drag to test each connection to make sure the pivot looks natural and doesn’t break your textures where they connect.
- Go to animate mode. Click each frame where you need a new key. Using IK or FK adjust as desired.
It looks so much worse typed out. You have to try it for yourself.
Platforms are for Windows only, currently. Again, we want to get the tool right first to get it into as many hands as quickly as possible. At the least it works well in WINE. The implementations for it are limitless. It is very easy to implement a runtime for Basis in another language using our included examples. I even tried to make a build for the Wii (using libogc and raw GX) and had it going in a few hours, having never messed with Wii homebrew code before.
Heh you asked a very broad question. It was hard not to make it even wordier. Hope that helps.
