[EDIT: Just released a beta of SWFSheet 1.1 here: http://www.bit-101.com/blog/?p=2948]
[EDIT: Version 1.1 final released: http://www.bit-101.com/blog/?p=2977]

SWFSheet is a program I created in most of a day back in late December. I finally polished it up this week and it’s now ready for release. The idea is to take an animation created in Flash, and generate a sprite sheet from it. A sprite sheet, for those of you who may not be familiar, is a single large bitmap containing several frames of an animation, usually layed out in a grid. These can be loaded in very efficiently by games, and each frame shown to recreate the animation.

I had the idea for this program while attempting to port some Flash stuff to the iPhone. And later while making other mobile games, I found that Flash was still the best tool to create animations. It has a powerful time line, easy to use drawing tools, tweens, 3D, and of course, powerful scripting with ActionScript. However, getting a nice looking Flash animation into a sprite sheet that could be used with cocos2d on the iPhone/iPad or with XNA for Windows Phone 7 was not so easy. I did it by hand a couple of times, and it wasn’t very fun. Thus, SWFSheet was born.

SWFSheet is an AIR application and has been tested on Windows and Mac. You create your SWF however you want. Flash CS5 or earlier, Flash Builder, or anything else that outputs a SWF. It doesn’t matter how it’s created. Then you load the SWF into SWFSheet.

Immediately, you’ll see the live loaded SWF running in the upper left panel. The program will then capture an image of the SWF on each frame for the number of frames you have specified (default 15) and arrange them in a grid on the bitmap. Once that is done, it will then animate this bitmap using the same techniques you would use to animate a sprite sheet in a real game. This is seen in the lower left panel. You can adjust how many frames you want to capture to make sure you get your whole animation and have it loop smoothly. And you can adjust the frame of exactly how much area is captured in each frame, to maximize space on the bitmap. If there is not enough space to capture all frames, you can choose a larger bitmap. After any changes, you need to click “Capture” to re-capture the frames based on the new settings.

Often when scripting animations, you will have various transformations or other changes happening in an onEnterFrame type of loop. This can sometimes cause a glitch, as the first frame is captured before the first enterFrame handler fires, and thus does not have the initial transformations applied. There is a “Skip first frame” checkbox which handles this situation. There are also options for smoothing, which may or may not make any difference in a specific animation, and for transparency. By default, a loaded in SWF will have a transparent background, but you can override this to make an opaque bitmap with any color background you want. And you can change the preview frame rate – of course this doesn’t change the bitmap at all, but can give you an idea what your animation will look like at your target frame rate.

Note that there are a limited number of sized of bitmaps. Sprite sheets can almost always take advantage of extra efficiency when created in power-of-two sized squares – 64×64, 128×128, 256×256, etc. Thus, these are the only choices. A future version may make possible custom sizes if enough people ask for it.

Here’s the AIR installer:

SWFSheet Installer

And here are some test files to get started with:

Test Files

Enjoy!

ps. Another tool you might be interested in is Mike Jones’ Sprite Sheet Maker, which is more geared to making sprite sheets from a series of separate image files. Similar outcome, different use cases, depending on what kind of input you are starting from.

As usual, it’s time to make my year end post. I’ll keep it relatively brief.

A few changes this year. This spring, I got kind of fed up with Apple, their control-happy policies, and the general direction they are heading. After 3 years of being 100% Mac, I switched back to Windows. It is an action that I not only do not regret the tiniest bit, but as Apple continues to evolve in the same direction, I’m happier than ever that I switched when I did. This is not to say that I’ve abandoned all iOS development and have thrown away my Mac. I still own two Apple computers. Both are plugged in and booted up and ready for action at all time. I have an iPhone, and iPad, an iPod Touch and a 5G iPod. They aren’t going anywhere. But the machine I open up in the morning and use all day long is my Sony Vaio, and I’m very happy with it. I’m not shoving it down your throat. If you’re happy with Apple, far be it from me to try to change your mind. I’m OK, you’re OK, right?

Around the same time I switched back to Windows, I also came into the ownership of a Google Nexus One. It took a while to really get used to it, as it’s definitely not the polished experience that the iPhone is. But I forced myself to stick with it for a week or so and really started to love it. From my viewpoint, the main difference was that it was MY phone, not Steve Jobs’. I could do pretty much whatever I wanted with it. Change the lock screen, change the task switcher, add memory, change the battery, put my icons where I want them, install unsigned apps, have live gadgets on the home screen, etc. etc. Once I got used to it, the iPhone just seemed unbearably sterile. Unfortunately, the model I had was a T-Mobile version, so I couldn’t get 3G on it with my AT&T sim. I suffered with Edge for a several months, but finally the wifi connection and even the Edge connection started getting really flaky. One day in September, just couldn’t connect to anything, so it was back to the iPhone.

Coming back to the iPhone, I have to admit, I really did appreciate the slickness of the UI. But I didn’t fall back in love with it. To be honest, I knew it was only a stopgap until the new Windows Phones came out. I got a Samsung Focus as soon as they came out and I absolutely love it. It is without a doubt the best phone I’ve owned. Note – it’s far from perfect. It’s a v1 product and it shows in many ways. But regardless of all that, there is so much RIGHT about what Microsoft did with it. I’m really excited to see where it goes in the coming years. I don’t expect it to overtake or even match Android or iOS any time in the near future, if at all, and I don’t really care. As long as I can continue to own one and see it improve, I’m a happy camper.

As for mobile development, I didn’t do much at all most of the year. But this autumn and winter I worked on one major and one minor iOS projects at Infrared5. After being away from Objective-C for so long, it was pretty bizarre trying to get back into it. It took a couple of days before it stopped feeling like I was typing with my toes, but eventually I got back in the groove. I played with Android dev briefly, but never really dove into it that much. But in October, I got my hands dirty with Windows Phone dev, with both XNA and Silverlight, and it has blown me away. I might even say it’s revitalized me as a developer. For a large part of the year I was on a very tough, frustrating project. It wore me down quite a bit. But with Visual Studio and C#, it’s like starting from scratch – in a good way! All the excitement without the learning curve. After many years of Flash development, writing ActionScript is almost second nature to me. But after just a couple of months in Visual Studio, I feel like I’m more at home with C# than I ever was with ActionScript. It’s a very, very similar language. If you took AS3 and removed all the little things that annoy or distract you and pull you out of the “flow” of coding, and replaced them with a whole bunch of little things that just work exactly the way you would expect them to, you’d have C#. And if you took Flash Builder and … no, that’s just not going to work. There’s no comparing Eclipse to Visual Studio.

Speaking of IDEs, after working in VS for a few months, and then going back to XCode… it really dawned on me just how bizarre an IDE that really is. I’m really trying not to bash any particular technology, but I can’t help feeling like XCode was designed on an anti-matter planet in an alternate universe by some bizarre aliens on really strong acid. I’m not even talking about the language – just the IDE. I sometimes find it hard to believe that it was created by and for programmers. I know it’s not “wrong”, just different. Most IDEs are relatively similar, like most western human languages are pretty similar. I may not speak Spanish, but I can see it and read the words even if I don’t know their meaning, and can catch a bit of a hint of what’s being said. Same with most IDEs – you can quickly find your way around them for the most part. But diving into XCode is like being dropped in an Asian or Middle Eastern country where everything just looks like random scratchings or scribbles to your unfamiliar eye. That’s what XCode is like – just a completely foreign programming paradigm. Again, not saying it’s bad or wrong. You live with it long enough and you become fluent in it. But boy is it different.

Also in the summer I got into Processing quite a bit. Far more than I ever had before. I’ve kind of drifted from it again, but it was a great experience. I’m sure I’ll drift back around to it again before long. This largely came about from my conference session for 2010, “Programming Art”, in which I covered a bunch of different tools and languages for creating algorithmic and generative art, including Context Free Art, Structure Synth, Processing, the Hype Framework, and others. I also really enjoyed getting my head around Structure Synth, and got a bit revived on it just recently with the newly released integrated raytracer. Fun stuff!

On a personal basis, it was a year of health. I ran over 1000 miles, lost a good deal of weight, and reverted the trend of my blood sugar and blood pressure, which were edging into borderline problem areas. I think I also did more travelling this year than I have in any previous years, with trips to San Francisco, Minneapolis, Kortrijk Belgium, Toronto, Japan, back to San Francisco, and Edmonton.

Well so much for keeping in brief. In summary, it was a year of trying new things and going back to old things, learning new platforms and languages. Going forward, I don’t think it’s possible, at least not for me, to be a “Flash Developer”, or an “iPhone Developer” or be stuck in any single platform. Now more than ever, there is just too much diversity and you have to have a foot in every camp. If someone needs a game or an app these days, they can’t really just release a single version of it. They’re going to need an iPhone version, and Android version, eventually a Windows Phone version, and some kind of web presence with it. Are you going to just ask for one slice of that pie? Are they going to farm out their app to 4-5 different shops, one for each platform? As a company at the very least, you need to be able to do it all. Ideally as a developer as well, you need to be able to do as many of those as possible. I know that’s where Adobe is trying to be strong with the iPhone and Android packagers for Flash. I’m still not convinced those are the solutions for most projects though. Native will always win.

As for 2011, I assume the fist good chunk of the year I’ll be doing a lot more WP7 dev. And since the XNA codebase is 99% the same for WP7, Windows, and XBox games, I look forward to releasing some stuff for Windows desktop and XBox as well. I’m sure I’ll also play with the new Mac App Store stuff, and more iOS stuff too. The WP7 game I’m working on now will definitely need an iOS port. But who knows where I’ll go from there?