ex2D - the best 2D sprite solution for Unity [RELEASED]

Hi decoy98,

You can check the interface here to find if anything fit your demand:

http://www.ex-dev.com/ex2d/script_ref/classex_sprite_animation.html

You also can read article here learn more about playing animation by script:

http://www.ex-dev.com/ex2d/wiki/doku.php?id=manuallay_sprite_animation

 

Hi myprabath01,

I try to select a prefab but no error reports, can you give me the steps to reproduce it? Thanks in advance.

 

Hi Wu Jie, I have checked your links and here's the code I came up with..

function Update () {

if (Input.GetKey ("right"))

spAnim.Play ( "ninja_run" );

}

I was trying to make the ninja play the run animation when I press the right arrow button,
but then gives an error: BCE0005: Unknown identifier: 'spAnim'.

Would you please point me out to the right direction?

 

Hi decoy98,

I think it is because you didn't define the spAnim in your script. Try something like:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. exSpriteAnimation spAnim = GetComponent<exSpriteAnimation>();
3.  

You can define spAnim as your member data, and put the above code in your Awake function to improve the performance.

 

what happened to the Upcoming Features ?
I remember there was a prototype about the tile editor ?

will they be included in this version ? or separate plugins that work well together ?

 

jwu do you know anything about that?
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/111870-Procedural-mesh-update-slow-on-iphone-4

I get some spikes of performance in iPhone 4, and i don't discovery what is going on, but maybe this is the problem?

 

Hello nab477,

The upcoming features is delayed until 1.3.0 comes out. I'm currently designing the new structure and working flow in 1.3.0. There will be a big change to solve the problem in making ex2D working with CVS tools. Every new features will follow this new structure that's why they are hang on developing.

 

Hi badawe,

It looks like those spikes relate with garbage collection in Unity3D. But the GC is not just relate with procedural mesh but also the whole scripts you wrote in a game. For sprite changes, yes they will cause heap allocation I doubt.

 

How do we handle collisions with ex2d? Can we use Unity3d's physics system to handle them or does ex2d provide tools for this?

 

Humm

I'm try to figure what is going on on our game, Runs pretty well on iPad 2 / iPhone 3GS / iPod Touch, but when runs in iPhone 4G, he get some issues, and i can't figure what is going on!

 

@jwt gonna be realy nice if you can keep in somewhere, maybe in the wiki some otimizations of 2D ex2D like this things:

- Third, the advice. When atlas is created or edited, you leave "Read/Write Enabled" setting switched on. This way texture takes double amount of memory (2048x2048 atlas is 16Mb, and it takes 32Mb in iPad memory then running app). It will be greate to switch it off after atlas creation, for thouse who don't know or just forget about it.

- All sprite object must not keep Transform.Scale = (1,1,1). DO NOT touch it. Use exSprite.Scale instead. Because if Transform.Scale is not equal to 1,1,1. Unity will not add the object to batch

- Camera NearClipPlane must larger than 100. I still seek the reason, but I just found this two days ago

- Use more atlas as you can!

Anyone know any more adices of otimization?

 

function Awake () {

exSpriteAnimation spAnim = GetComponent(exSpriteAnimation)();

}

function Update () {

if (Input.GetKey ("right"))

spAnim.Play ( "ninja_run" );

}

Is this what you wanted me to do?
If so, then it still gives me an error: Assets/Scripts/run.js(2,18): UCE0001: ';' expected. Insert a semicolon at the end.

 

Hi dotty,

ex2D is well support the Unity's physics system, so yes you can. Current version of ex2D didn't provide tools for customize the collider by picture, but will be done in the future.

 

Hi badawe,

I think I've fixed the Read/Write Enabled problem. In current version, if you update the altas texture, it will turn back to Read/Write disabled,

The rest of your advice can be found here:

http://www.ex-dev.com/ex2d/wiki/doku.php?id=manual:advance:less_drawcall

 

Hi decoy98,

Well, I think you are getting compile error which means you are not write the script in the right way. Let me show you the full answer:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2.  
3. public exSpriteAnimation spAnim;
4.  
5. function Awake () {
6.      spAnim = GetComponent.<exSpriteAnimation>();
7. }
8.  
9. function Update () {
10.     if (Input.GetKey ("right"))
11.         spAnim.Play ( "ninja_run" );
12. }
13.  

Please if there have syntax error, try to fix it.

 

Oh man, thank you very much jwu.

I got to the point where when I press the "d" key the ninja moves to the right... but then the animation does not carry over.
How do I change this code so that the animation carries over?

void Update () {

exSpriteAnimation spanim = GetComponent<exSpriteAnimation>();
if (Input.GetKey ("d")) {
spanim.Play("ninja_run");
transform.Translate (400 * Time.deltaTime,0,0);
}
}

Thank you very much for helping a newbie out. You have done an awesome job with the ex2D plug-in.
I hope it becomes mainstream soon .

 

Do we have a timeframe on this? It seems the other popular 2d system provides this already. Are there any video's on using Ex2D with unity's physics engine?

 

Hi decoy98,

Since the Play will rewind the animation next time it comes, you should try:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2.  
3. void Update () {
4.     exSpriteAnimation spanim = GetComponent<exSpriteAnimation>();
5.     if ( Input.GetKeyDown ("d") ) {
6.         if ( spanim.IsPlaying("ninja_run") == false )
7.             spanim.Play("ninja_run");
8.         transform.Translate (400 * Time.deltaTime,0,0);
9.     }  
10. }
11.  

 

Hi dotty,

Sorry, but no milestone for this yet. I'm currently busy in developing v1.3.0, other new features are hang on until v1.3.0 comes out.

I think we treat physics in a pretty easy way. Here is the documentation about how to use collision with ex2D:

http://www.ex-dev.com/ex2d/wiki/doku.php?id=manual:advance:collision_helper_usage

 

I am trying to use ex2d sprite object as Tap GUIButton.I Position the specific sprite using viewport value.

So My question is how to identify touch position is inside the specific sprite's Area. (have to be resolution independent)

With more detail,
My sprite scales (x =1.5 Y=1.5)
View port Position = (0.8, 0.2)

 

Hi myprabath01,

ex2D provide the exSprite.boundingRect which is a rect calculate in local space. I think you can convert it to world space or screen space for hit testing. The easiest way is add a collision box and use RayCast function.

 

Hello,

I'm in the process of trying out the ex2D evaluation version, and I can't for the life of me get the collisions to work.

I have two sprites on the scene, both on the same layer, and both with the collider helper set to box. I can see the box colliders on the screen just fine, but they don't collide at all (or cause trigger if I try it that way).

Is there anything else I need to do that I'm missing?

 

Hi Dwel,

Check if they are put in proper z position. Also if you enable the Auto Length, don't make your camera near and far clip too large, 100 distance could be a good value. The Unity have problem when long length box collide with each other.

 

Oh, I think I spotted what's going on. For instance, for moving right I am using:

" transform.Translate (Vector3.left * 1 * Time.deltaTime * speed) "

If I add a rigidBody to the sprite object, it collides, but it then gets sent sliding backwards as a reaction.

I there another method I should be using for movement so it takes into account the collision? (without necessarily using the rigidbody, which makes everything get pushed around)

Edit: Ok, figured out how to stop the pushing, though I'm still interested in knowing if there's another way to make the collisions work without a rigidbody on every sprite object.

 

Hi Dwel,

For more details about collider in Unity3D, you can check this documentation: http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/class-MeshCollider.html. Just check the table in the last section, it will give you the full answer.

 

Hi, Quick Question.
Im want to pack the atlases for later download In game.
So Im going to Do Assest Bundling. What i want to know is, when i bundle the atlus do i need to bundle atlus info files too ???

 

Hi myprabath01,

I didn't do asset bundle yet. But base on the design, you need only bundle Atlas, Atlas Texture, Atlas Material. The Atlas - Editor Info is just used in Editor not relate to final game.

 

I just decided to look further into what already seemed to be a great 2D solution, and holy cow this is impressive ...
Outstanding work about ex2D. Tools are very pro. It really looks like the best 2D solution at the moment.
(and the price is very reasonable for such quality)

About the ToDo list and GUI Editor, I can't find a concrete list of said features on the site, like what will be implemented precisely (button touch management ? scrolling text containers ? etc). Do you have any info about it, plus a potential release date estimation ?
(could definitely convince me to purchase ex2d if good UI solutions are available soon)

Thanks

 

Hi n0mad,

Thank you for your kind words, we are great people like this tool.
We currently very busy in developing the v1.3.0. Since it changes a lot in the base structure, we need to test it a lot after it can stably released. So before that, any plan of new features will be delay and on hold.

About the GUI, we've develop some of the controls such as Button and Scroll View and test them in our project. It is good enough for our use but far more than publish for general use. I can't define a time on these features, besides Unity3D seem to introduce ScaleForm and their brand new GUI system recently. We would like to see how good they are. So the UI solution may not available soon.

Hope these information can help you in developing.

Best Regards.

 

I'm having trouble setting one's exScreenPosition.x to another objects exScreenPosition.x. How would I go about doing this?

 

Hi kheng,

Can you explain more about this ?

 

Thanks for the info !

 

Loving ex2D, and we have been using it for a number of games that are currently in production. However, we came across an odd problem, and after banging on it for a few hours, it seemed like time to ask the experts.

What we have is 90 objects rendering to the screen, in a 3D ring (think of it like Coverflow on iOS devices). Each entry is a sprite. The problem we are finding, is that we are ending up with 91 objects getting batched, and 92 draw calls (this includes our UI elements). If we modify the code so that the sprites all use the exact same sprite image, from the same sprite atlas, we still have 92 draw calls - regardless of all sprites using the same shader, and the same atlas, and the same image from that atlas. We have never had an issue with draw calls in ex2D before, so this problem came as a bit of a surprise.

In addition to reducing the images down to just one, we have tried a number of other tests including copy/pasting the sprites within the game while it is running. This is where things get even stranger - while we have 90 of the same sprite, each with its own draw call, when we copy/paste while the game is running, it does NOT add any more draw calls!

Would anyone have any suggestions on what to try next as a solution?

 

Hi DCalabrese:

Base on your description, I think it might be one of these problems:

1. The scale in transform is not equals to (1.0, 1.0, 1.0)
2. Your sprite, in some how changes the material so they don't use the same material. (Probably from script you write "Material mat = renderer.material;" this line of code will generate a different material though they are same settings. Try to use sharedMaterial instead )

You can also check this document to help you understand how batch draw setup in ex2D:

http://www.ex-dev.com/ex2d/wiki/doku.php?id=manual:advance:less_drawcall

 

Nevermind I figured it out. I have to use GetComponent<exScreenPosition>();

 

is there an alternative way to set a sprite ?
I tried exSprite.SetSprite, but it seems after I add something to the atlas, it has the potential to change the index of the sprite !!

is there a more stable way than going to the atlas finding the "current" index ( double checking everything after adding something !!

 

Hi nab477,

The exSprite.SetSprite is working in the run time. If you hard coded it when init the game. You should try something like:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. exSprite sprite = GetComponent<exSprite>();
3. sprite.SetSprite ( your_atlas, your_atlas.GetIndexByName("foobar_01") );
4.  

Even more, you can make an animation clip with sprite texture you would like to setup in this clip, and try

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. public exSpriteAnimClip myDefaultSets;
3.  
4. ...
5. ...
6. void Awake () {
7.     exSprite sprite = GetComponent<exSprite>();
8.     sprite.SetSprite ( myDefaultSets.frameInfos[0].atlas, myDefaultSets.frameInfos[0].index );
9. }
10.  

So in this two ways, no matter how you change the sprite, they will find the index correctly.

In the v1.3.0, we are going to change the whole architecture, so it will still keep correct index for a texture in their texture information assets, and you can use these assets for setup.

 

(Sry if my english isn't very good, it's not my native language :-|)
Hi everyone!
I'm having troubles with an input and exSpriteAnimation script, I hope you could help me .
What I want my script to do is when I press left ctrl an "attack" animation is played and then return to the default sprite even if ctrl is still pressed.
But what's really happening is that when I hit ctrl the animation "jumps" stays in first frame of "attack", not playing the animation at all (btw, it has 6 frames and its supposed to be played once)

Attack Script

Code (csharp):

1. if(Input.GetButton("Fire1") /* isMoving == false*/)
2.  
3.     {
4.         isAttacking = true;
5.         anim.Play("attack", PlayMode.StopAll); //If "PlayMode.StopAll" is not there, the animation stays in the first frame, otherwise it jumps to the last frame
6.     }

Movement Script (which is actually working)

Code (csharp):

1. if(Input.GetKey("up"))
2.         {
3.             //isMoving = true;
4.             anim.Play("walk", PlayMode.StopAll);
5.             if(posZ <= 670 )
6.             {
7.                 transform.Translate(0,Time.deltaTime*speed,0); 
8.             }
9.         }
10.  
11.         else if(Input.GetKey("down"))
12.         {
13.  
14.             //isMoving = true;
15.             anim.Play("walk", PlayMode.StopAll);
16.             transform.Translate(0,-(Time.deltaTime*speed),0);
17.         }
18.  
19.         else
20.         {
21.             anim.Play("stand", PlayMode.StopAll);
22.         }
23.  
24.        
25.  
26.    
27.     /*---LEFT AND RIGHT MOVEMENT---*/
28.  
29.         if(Input.GetKey("left"))
30.         {
31.             //isMoving = true;
32.                         if(!facingLeft)
33.             {
34.                 transform.Rotate(0,180,0);
35.                 facingLeft = true;
36.             }
37.             transform.Translate(Time.deltaTime*speed,0,0);
38.             anim.Play("walk", PlayMode.StopAll);
39.         }
40.  
41.         if(Input.GetKey("right"))
42.         {
43.             //isMoving = true;
44.             if(facingLeft)
45.             {
46.                 transform.Rotate(0,180,0);
47.                 facingLeft = false;
48.             }
49.             anim.Play("walk", PlayMode.StopAll);
50.             transform.Translate(Time.deltaTime*speed,0,0);
51.         }
52.  
53.    

Any suggestion will be appreciated
Thanks in advance!

 

Hi mnt,

The exSpriteAnimation component didn't provide you any parameter of PlayMode.StopAll. So what is the exactly class here for anim?

BTW: the play of exSpriteAnimation and Animation has different behavior. When you call exSpriteAnimation.Play("your_anim") you need to check if it is playing, other wise it will rewind the playing animation. The Animation will check this automatically, and don't do anythings if the desired animation is playing.

Based on your code, I can only see that your Movement and Attack logic are handle parallel, but sprite animation only accept one state in one time. So if you keep working and doing attack, only show some frame of attacking and rewind to movement.

 

@mnt

If you don't want rapid fire when the button is pressed, make sure you are using GetKeyDown instead of GetKey.
GetKey will return true very frame until you release the button.

Make sure your script is not repeating unnecessarily before doing the debug for animation.

 

Hi,

we have a problem with ex2d. Every time one of our team members gets latest from SVN and opens Unity to start the asset building / importing process (starts automatically when you select your project folder), it crashes - twice. Once for the ex 2d atlas file, and once for the ex 2d sprite animation file. The 3rd time we open Unity it finishes. I was surprised to find that the latest version did not fix this.

Anyone else having this problem? It happens on both Mac and PC for us.

 

Hi jerotas,

Yes, looks like I have the problem, too. I'll try to fix it asap.

 

Cool, jwu.

I was having another problem last night....it worked until I checked it in. And then when I nuked my entire folder and got latest, it was broken. I get the following error when trying to set the scale of an exSprite, even if I set it to its current scale (no change) which is (1,1):
------------------------------
Mesh.vertices is too small. The supplied vertex array has less vertices than are referenced by the triangles array.
UnityEngine.Mesh:set_vertices(Vector3[])
exSprite:UpdateMesh(Mesh)
exSprite:InternalUpdate()
-----------------------------
Any ideas? This is driving me nuts.
Thanks

 

Hey Wu,

I've been pretty happy with ex2D so far, but I gotta say I'm not a fan of the new layer system in 1.2.2+. Can you explain the reasoning behind the change?

Overall, I find it much more cumbersome to use the LayerManager, especially when spawning new objects that need to be added to the hierarchy.

 

same with me. i will finds rather its easy to use manual runtime layering by

mExSprite.layer2d.ForceSetLayer(mExSprite.layer2d.layer,current_bias);
mExSprite.layer2d.UpdateDepth();

But i didn't update my ex2d to 1.2.3 since layer2d is removed from newer editions.

 

I haven't had a big opportunity to use the new layer manager, but I was using it for a prototype. I can see the general idea and where it is going. A unified way of managing layers for objects is a good thing, and is typically how I do it. Normally I have a layer property of a base object between 0-31 inclusive. This makes managing layers for objects pretty easy, and I can set them on the prefabs/templates/whatever.

 

Hi,

I am trying to follow the tutorial video: ex2D Tutorial I: Basic Sprite Animation, but could get the background image scale and make it fit perfect according to the camera viewable size.

May I know what is wrong?

The settings:

 

Any news about premultiplied alpha ? Both of the other 2D tools have this, and this is the only thing that stops me buying this amazing toolset.

Waiting for replies,

Thank you.

 

OK~~~~~~~~~~~, looks like you should carefully manage your folder. Current version of ex2D have so many things depends on each other, that's what we going to solve in v 1.3.

I think your project should be nuked after those operation. May be you can think about reimport things and rebuild the atlas to solve it.

 

Hi CapnCromulent,

I think you can remove the exLayer from the sprite if you don't need the new Layer system. We are working hard to improve it. In the latest daily build, we add Dynamic Layer and Abstract Layer.

The Dynamic Layer can help you add objects in a specific range, the Abstract one will stick the object in same z value. We also fix some bug when calculate the layer.

For spawning new object. you can use prefab to adjust the layer of this object. When it spawn, just set its parent to a specific layer that already put in the scene.

For example:

I usually put a empty game-object and add exLayer on it. Let's name it layerEnemy, and in the enemy spawner, I will expose a property for user set this layer. After that, when enemy spawned, it will do

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. GameObject newObject = GameObject.Instantiate ( ... );
3. newObject.GetComponent<exLayer>().parent = layerEnemy;
4.  

Hope this help you.