No video or anything big this week, just wanted to make a quick update post since it seems like nothing terribly “exciting” is on the horizon in terms of new features or anything.
What’s been done?
I’ve been busy since the last update posts, here’s some of the things that were accomplished.
- Successful saving and loading of projects and stickfigures. This was a biggie and required a lot of work in areas of programming I haven’t dabbled much in (namely playing around with files during runtime). A lot of work also went into optimizing save files. As a result, a typical .stknodes project file is less than 10kb for a hundred or so frames.
- Frame background color added, you can now change the background color of individual frames with a color chooser.
- Made it so there are 2 frames of tweening instead of just 1. Can you say smooth animation?
- Lots of miscellaneous fixes and tweaks, it seems I find something new to fix every day.
What’s left?
- Since this is being built for mobile devices, I have to keep in mind this app can run on almost any resolution imaginable. This past week I discovered that at anything lower than the iPhone 4 resolution (960 x 640), the app begins to look a bit like fecal matter – the graphics get a bit too skewed and the font gets blurry. This is really bugging me and I’m hoping to discover a fix soon.
- The current .gif encoder I have implemented works and is cross-platform, but that’s about all the good I can say about it. It doesn’t necessarily work well (it seems to take a bit too long to encode things that should only take about half the time) and the resulting files seem un-optimized in terms of file size. I’d like to find another solution but damn, these things are hard to come by…
- Fixes for some very elusive bugs that seemingly pop up whenever they want and can’t be tracked down.
So yeah, I have a little left on my plate before I can release Stick Nodes. I’m looking at more of a release date some time in July.
In the meantime, more NON-TWEENED VS. TWEENED ANIMATIONS!
