Requested feature, sprite sockets

Hey,

There's a useful feature that UE4 has which seems to be missing from Unity, in UE4 we can add sprite sockets in the sprite editor, which defines a location that we can use to, for example, spawn a particle. That socket can be positioned to match each sprites in an animation, Let's say we create a "Gun" socket, we can align it with the gun of each sprites, this makes it easy to know where the gun is located at all times.

 

It wouldn't be sufficient as the sprite is animated and the elements of that sprite such as the gun, are moving every frames, to be able to spawn a projectile from the barrel of the gun i'd have to animate the child Gameobject so that it would precisely follow the gun during each frames of each animations.

Sockets could easily be created and positioned on each sprite frames, then used as dynamic locations for instantiating prefabs and so on, i was actually surprised that Unity didn't have this feature.

 

I've decided to try and just animate a Gameobject to follow all my animations, it almost works but the issue is that my sprite animations are playing at a low framerate but the Gameobject's animated position is moving every game frames so it doesn't quite follow the sprites, the Gameobject's position curves would have to look like stairs instead of nice rounded hills, i haven't found a way to do that with curves.

 

Setting the animation curves to "Both tangents > Constant" solved my problem and it now follows properly.

Still, "sprite sockets" would be a more user friendly way of doing that.

Keep up the good work.

 

It doesn't work with my jumping animation which uses 5 different animations of a single frame and a blend tree to change between them depending on the vertical velocity, the Gameobject position is also being blended gradually which causes the same issue i've demonstrated above.

 

I agree this would be a useful feature. They're usually referred to as attach points. You can look at 2D Tookit's documentation to see how they tackled the issue.

I guess you would just add another sprite editor "mode" that would allow placing points and naming them? Since you added colliders to sprites, this seems like a natural addition.