I have a character in a game with a bunch of animations (idling, walking, jumping, etc) and I want to reuse those animations for a character that looks the same in another level but has different behaviors there.
So I wish I could tap “add animation” and have it give me the option of letting me select from all animations that I’ve already made in that game, or even from my other games.
That’s a super duper idea; I support it. For now though, an alternative would be to select every frame of the first character’s animations and copy-paste them into new animations of the second character, but this isn’t very efficient (or fun) if you have more than a few frames per animation.
Another alternative is cloning the game (if you have Indie), then closing and reopening the original game to extract the full spritesheet from the clone of the game and insert it into the original game’s second character, then create the new char’s anims and move the sprites around to order the frames, then finally resize it to original size of the character using the button in the Sprite Editor (if this is confusing I could make a video tutorial).
(I think it’s customary to offer a temporary alternative to a feature request in-case it doesn’t get added, or just in the meantime)
I don’t mean to be piggybacking, but I have a similar request that could be closely related to this one: a “clone animation” feature. This would be a simple button in the animation bottom sidebar (is that what it’s called?) that allows you to choose any animation you’ve created in a single object and create an exact copy of it.
For example, if you have an animation called “run” with 4 frames and then you click this button, you would have an animation called “run-2” that looks exactly the same and could also have the same frame delay.
The way I imagine this feature you’re saying, is an expansion of the Browse feature that already exists in the Sprite Editor. Like when you click Browse, there’s another section where you can browse animations. Or instead of that, there could be another Browse button, or instead of that you could just right-click the browse button that already exists and it would let you browse animations.
I’m pretty sure you can use the ‘Browse’ button in the lower right to find the sprites and animated frames from your other games.
Yeah, you can. That is the basis of my second alternative idea to this feature request. That won’t copy your animations though.
For the game you’re currently editing, the Browse button only shows the main sprite and none of its animations or frames. For your other games, it will show the main sprite and all of the object’s frames, but adding it to your current game won’t automatically create a new animation for the object, like Spongefile is wanting to do, but it will just replace the sprite with an entire spritesheet of the browse object you clicked on.
Yeah. A feature that lets one copy animations would be very useful.
Another possibility might be to have a child specifically inherit the animations of its parent (with a checkbox, for example).