ex2D for Unity Beta Testing Started! Join our beta testing and get the free download.

Hello guys,

Our Unity extension package ex2D is coming soon. We are running the final beta test and will submit this plugin to Unity Stores in 1-2 week. The beta version is full functional and free to use. But we are constantly improving the tool, so please leave your feedback if you have any problem or want to have more features. We will make sure to address issue fixes and new features in the released version of ex2D.

• Official Site: http://www.ex-dev.com/ex2d
• Beta2 Download Page: http://www.ex-dev.com/ex2d/beta.html
• Documentation: http://www.ex-dev.com/ex2d/wiki

The ex2D is originally developed to help us aBit Games Studio to easily make 2D games in Unity. We are experienced Unity developers, and you can check out our 2D sprite heavy iOS game - Super Sheep Tap in App Store.



Changes in Beta2

• New Features
  • Support pixel-perfect in Sprite, SpriteFont
  • Support multi-line text in SpriteFont
  • Atlas view can zoom in/out in Atlas Editor
  • Add Layer2D Component for better layer setup
• Changes
  • Prevent adding same texture in different atlas
  • Add drag drop Sprite Animation Clip in Sprite Animation Inspector
  • Remove layer setup functions from SpriteBase, use Layer2D component instead
  • Prevent adding same BitmapFont in the same atlas
  • Add useMultiline property in SpriteFont
  • Sprite Animation Editor will not select event info and frame info at the same time
  • Add exSpriteAnimation::IsPlaying( string )
  • Add exSpriteAnimation::IsPaused( string )
  • Sprite Animation Editor draw preview and Frame fit the view size
• Bugs Fixed
  • Fix Sprite, SpriteFont editing in Animation Window generate dummy frame keys
  • Fix Sprite, SpriteFont editing in Animation Window will miss meshes
  • Fix after building atlas, Sprite prefab will not be dirty that cause data not saves
  • Fix layer will not update correctly when editing SpriteBase directly in prefab
  • Fix Sprite Animation Inspector don't have way to change animation count
  • Fix Sprite Animation Clip not trigger event in WrapMode.Loop
  • Fix Import Compress Texture to Atlas shows Apply button
  • Fix Atlas Editor and Animation Editor GUI focus can't changed
  • Fix Atlas Editor delete Element will not rebuild Sprite Animation Clip
  • Fix exLayer2D calculate depth value not relate with camera z position
  • Fix width and height will reset to 512 when change selection in New Atlas state
  • Fix change selection not repaint Saved Path in Atlas, Sprite Animation and BitmapFont editor

Introduction

ex2D is a highly integrated 2D-sprite-related development extension for Unity. It aims at providing high performance 2D sprite/UI solution inside Unity, with a specific focus on creating tons of cutting-edge sprite animations and other content in complicated Unity scenes, while still maintaining great performance on mobile devices.

ex2D includes several editor class that runs as view tabs inside Unity, to help developers making 2D assets easily. They are Atlas Editor, Font Editor, SpriteAnimation Editor, the upcoming Tile Map Editor and 2D Skinning Editor. All the editors are written by C# script and directly run in Unity.

ex2D follows the Unity working pipeline standard closely. Unlike other 2D plugins in Unity which directly saves 2D resource in Components, we use the ScriptableObject to handle most of the 2D resource (Atlas, Sprite Animation, Bitmap Font, ... ). In this way, ex2D generates assets that easily reusable and manageable for content-rich projects. We also design several Components to reference these data when editing the scene and runtime scripting. Following the advanced asset listening technique in ex2D, developers will not need to worry about data out of the date, they will sync automatically.

ex2D is highly optimized for mobile devices, the code is carefully written to prevent heap allocating and produce less draw calls.

Features



Atlas Editor

• Pack textures into texture atlas in an editor window inside Unity.
• Can manually move, add and remove textures in atlas.
• Automatically detect atlas changes and apply to the scene immediately.
• Generate atlas asset under the standard of ScriptableObject in Unity.

Sprite Component

• Add this component to any GameObject to turn it into a sprite.
• You can drag and drop texture file to the Sprite Component. The Sprite Component will detect if the texture is included in any atlas asset and choose the proper asset. If the texture is not in any atlas, it will just use the original texture file.
• Scale sprites in game without breaking dynamic batching.
• Choose different Anchor position for aligning the sprites in different type of Sprite Animation.
• Support different camera direction (XY, XZ, YZ)
• Pixel Perfect render support.
• Layer system to help Designer and Artist sort out the rendering order of all sprites in the scene.
• Automatically adjust the collider size when the sprite size changed.

Sprite Animation Clip Editor

• User friendly interface.
• Scale and scroll enabled time line editor.
• Move, add, remove and insert Frame Element by dragging and dropping them directly.
• Adjustable single frame length to make animation creating more versatile.
• Support adding animation events directly in the timeline editor.
• Preview animation result in the editor.

SpriteAnimation Component

• Reference sprite animation in script by clip names.
• Provide interface to control animation state ( play, pause, stop )
• Support pause/resume animation.

Atlas Font Editor

• Support fonts export from BMfont and Hiero.
• Multiple fonts can be put together in one big texture atlas to save draw calls.
• Fonts can also be put together with other texture sprite to save draw calls.
• Manage fonts easily in atlas editor.

SpriteFont Component

• Support rendering text from Atlas Font asset and Bitmap Font asset.
• Support in game gradient color rendering (you can specify two colors for gradient and change them in runtime).
• Support in game outline rendering (outline width and color are adjustable).
• Support in game shadow rendering (offset and color are adjustable).
• Support multi-line text.

Upcoming Features

• Tile Map Editor and Tile Map working pipeline
• 2D skeleton animation editor
• 2D Skinning editor
• 2D GUI editor

Researching

• Working pipeline for multiple resolution.
• Export the 2D scenes and assets in xml and json file formation.
• Load the exported xml/json file in Cocoa2D.
• Load the exported xml/json file in Web-Browser(Html5).

 

It looks great!!!
Although the link to download beta is not working properly. Firefox hangs and Chrome downloaded a 307kb package.

 

Cool. How much would it cost after the beta. I guess it would be nice to have a video showing this plugin. Checking out now.

 

The price is not decided yet. We may provide a flexible price, That the basic 3 tools (Atlas, Sprite Animation, Font Editor) will be charged at a base price, and we may sell more powerful features separately, such as Tile Map, Skinning Animation, Multi-Resolution convert process, export to Cocoa2D and Html5.

 

牛x！

 

Fantastic !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I like the sheep !

6R

 

Hi Alardaen, I just fix the download link, check if it works correct.

 

Is working now, thanks

 

Awesome! Looking forward to trying out your beta.

 

This looks great-- I want to look into this when it's out of beta!

 

a intro video is in the making

 

I can download but the unitypackage doesn't load into Unity3D !?! (I use Unity Pro 3.4 !)
Impossible to test !!!

6R

 

Could you be more specific about what happened?

We tested with Import Custom Package and it works fine on all the system we have.

 

Ok ! Nantas... It works now !
I just tried to open it directly by clicking on the unitypackage and "importation failed" !
With import custom package it works fine !!!

I have tried to use it (creation of a sprite and an animation) and it's really great and so easy to use...
Great job !

6R

 

Nice plugin for Unity! It might be very useful for a 2D Game

 

My first tests with the great beta of ex2D...
I made the animation + pictures with Daz Studio 3... using my own cartoon effect !

6R

 

Thank you so much for posting a video! I hope your project goes well!
We will post a video explaining the idea behind ex2D sprite pipeline and showing some examples of what you can do with it.

 

You're welcome...
I have worked a lot to find a nice 2D or 3D cartoon effect for my fixed or animated renders in Daz Studio, especially to use with ex2D !!!
Great ! I'm waiting for your videos...



6R

 

do you have a pdf file for the documentation for it ? the reason why i ask is that my other computer that has no internet has unity on it and not this one

 

I'm still working on documentation, and I will accept your advice and bring a pdf format in the final version.

 

Beta2 is now open for testing. Check out our web-site: http://www.ex-dev.com/ex2d/beta.html

 

Thanks a lot...
The Ninja demo scene is wonderful.

6R