Gideros Library for Reading Spriter SCML

Gideros Mobile development framework, also known as Gideros Studio, is a tool used to create, test and deploy graphically rich games and applications for mobile phones, specifically iPhone, iPad and Android.

Spriter, a recent kickstarter project,  is an animation tool for creating 2d real-time game characters and effects in a visual editor. The character animiations are saved to an open xml-based format.

We’ve written a small library to read the current SCML file format produced by Spriter (the project is in beta phase so this format may change a little or a lot as the project matures).   Our Spriter library builds a lua timeline table from the SCML data — the timeline table can be used to create a Gideros MovieClip.   The code can be found in one of our github repositories.

The following YouTube clip shows the “Example Hero” example that comes with the Spriter beta distribution running in the Gideros player.

The “main.lua” file in the github repository has a simple example of how to use the library (it opens the SCML file, then lets you retrieve a Gideros MovieClip).  You can also use the “timeline” function to retrieve a lua table with entries for each frame of the animation.   Each entry in the timeline has the following format:

{ beginFrame, endFrame, sprite, name="framename" }

This timeline can be passed to the Gideros MovieCliip constructor:

movieClip = MovieClip.new(timeline)

If you have any suggestions or requests for our small library, let us know.

–ndoss

Categories: Developers

Leave a Reply