Flump and Sparrow 2.0

iosNighthawk

Just curious has anyone successfully used Flump with Sparrow 2.0?

http://threerings.github.io/flump/

I was looking at the objective c run time and it appears to be using an older version of Sparrow from OpenGL ES 1.

Shilo

It took a bit for me to find the objective-c runtime (which it seems you have found) here:
https://github.com/threerings/betwixt

In theory, as long as it uses Sparrow, it's portable to Sparrow 2.0. But one thing is certain, it seems to be quite a large and complex library (seemingly unnecessary classes) without any official documentation. If it had just a few classes extending Sparrow, such as BTMovie, and the original flump library, I would be willing to give it a shot. After downloading and running the XCode project for betwist, I noticed that it has 3 linked external libraries, which all 3 are not properly linked.

Sorry, my post isn't really meaningful to the topic, but I thought it'd be worth voicing.

iosNighthawk

Thank Shilo! Yeah that betwixt sample is a mess. I finally have a project close to compiling after adding about 300 files. Just some sparrow errors from the old API right now I'm going through. Gonna try and get those worked out and then see if I can slim things down once I understand how it all works.

Shilo

Great job so far, seems like quite the task. Keep us posted. 🙂

iosNighthawk

Well unfortunately I'm gonna have to call it quits. I just don't have the time and I'm running into a lot more errors from their src classes. More files are missing and some of them appear to not even be needed. Do you know if there is anything similar to Flump that runs on Sparrow?

iosNighthawk

Hey Shilo, I'm thinking about writing the parser myself. Basically using the XML and .PNG that Flump exports I should be able to parse the frames into a SPMovieClip class right?

Basically for each frame I would create a DisplayObject, do all the necessary transforms, then draw that into a SPRenderTexture which can be added to the SPMovieClip.

Shilo

As I rarely use Flash, I don't know of anything similar to Flump. I also don't know the details on how the Flump exporter works, so I couldn't give you a definite answer.

But it seems very possible to do exactly what you mentioned. I encourage you to give it a try, and no matter if you complete it or not, I would love to take a look at a sample project of your progress. 🙂

Daniel

At the moment, there's no alternative for Flump that works with Sparrow, unfortunately.

So it would be awesome if you could give it a try!

However, I wouldn't use a render texture / Movie Clip: that destroys the whole idea about Flump, having an animation type that doesn't require much texture memory. It would be better to actually animate the images that make up an animation.

iosNighthawk

Hey Daniel your right that would defeat the purpose! Well I'm gonna give it a try. The project I am working on now is pretty big and we need to save as much texture space as we can.

iosNighthawk

Hey Daniel and Shilo,

So I have Flump + Sparrow complete for the most part. I programmed this pretty fast so it may not be the best looking code, but the animations run great!

SPFlumpExport handles building the SPFlumpMovie's from Flump's exported xml file. Note that an xml from flump can contain more than one SPFlumpMovie.

SPFlumpMovie class will handle playing and advancing the animations (FPFlumpLayers). I just pulled code from SPMovieClip that was required to advance the frames, play, stop, pause, loop, set fps, listener for onComplete, etc.

SPFlumpLayers handle updating their individual frames of animation. SPImages make up animation frames. I only allocate enough SPImages necessary to animate a layer.

SPFlumpKeyframe is just a helper class for storing all the key frame data for scaling, skewing, positioning, layer frames. I pre-calculate all the tweens into this class as well so they don't have to be calculated at run time.

SPFlumpLibrary is a Singleton that can be used to manage all the SPFlumpExports. Here you can bulk load SPFlumpExports, retrieve SPFlumpMovies and SPFlumpExports, add and remove SPFlumpExports. Memory will be free'd up when SPFlumpExports are removed too.

There is a dependency. I use TBXML to do all the xml parsing. Its non arc so you have to set the compiler flag. (-fno-objc-arc).

It's very basic but should be just enough for anyone to use and add more features to it as well. Someone could even take more time to turn it into a great extension. I think removing the TBXML dependency would be a great start.

I'm pretty sure I will be adding more features to it as I use more animations in this project I am currently on.

But, thanks for the awesome framework guys! The creators of Flump did an amazing job as well. Their export and the Sparrow Framework made this task a lot easier than it could have been.

Here it is.
http://levieggert.com/Sparrow+Flump.zip

Daniel

Sorry for the late reply!

Wow, thanks a lot for all your efforts on this! That looks like a very clean set-up, well done! It's awesome to have Flump working with Sparrow 2.0. 😃

As for the XML dependency: I created a small extension for NSXMLParser (part of Sparrow 2.0) that I'm using for Sparrow's standard XML files. Maybe the Flump files could be parsed with that. It depends on the complexity of those files.

If I could ask one last thing from you, it would be awesome if you could add the code to the list of Sparrow 2.0 extensions in the wiki! That way, people could find it more easily -- and I'm sure many developers have a need for this! =)

Again, thanks a lot for your work on this!

iosNighthawk

Hey Daniel I'm currently updating the extension to use NSXMLParser and I'm running into a problem allocating SPImages while on the NSXMLParser block.

In the parse block I allocate a SPImage which gets added to a dictionary. When I print the width and height of the images in the block I get a width and height greater than 0.

When parsing completes I iterate through images in the dictionaries and their width and heights are 0.

Is there any reason why allocating the SPImage in a block would be acting funky? Doesn't seem like it would.

iosNighthawk

Hey never mind that I found what the problem was! 😃

iosNighthawk

Hey Daniel,

Well I'm pretty happy to announce that Flump is now available as an extension for Sparrow 2.0.

Thank you for the amazing Sparrow Framework and a big shout out to the creators of Flump!

http://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/extensions/sxflump
https://github.com/levieggert/SXFlump

Daniel

Awesome!! Thanks a lot for adding those finishing touches -- great to have it in the list of extensions, where it's easy to find for other users. And with the description, people will be able to get started quickly.

Well done, a big thanks from the Gamua birds! 😃

iosNighthawk

No problem Daniel, happy to help!

And I have a question that just came to mind. I was gonna post in a separate topic, but it actually relates to the Flump Extension.

Basically, is there a way to load texture atlas's by path? I've always loaded everything by name only.

With Flump you don't have control of atlas names. All atlas's get saved in a generic order, atlas1.png, atlas2.png, and so on. So if I loaded a bunch of Flump Exports I would end up with multiple atlas1.png's.

However, there is path in the Flump Export relative to the user's local system. So it would be possible to load by a path if I could somehow include that path in XCode and then load the atlas by path in Sparrow. Can atlas's be loaded by directory path in Sparrow?

Daniel

You can use a full path in the "initWithContentsOfFile:" method. However, when you add a resource to Xcode, Xcode will all copy it into one flat folder during packaging -- at least per default.

Try it out in one of your ipa-files: when you look into it, you'll see one folder with all resource files.

But there's a way around that: when you add the resource to Xcode, select "Create folder references for any added folders". You'll see blue folder icons in the project navigator for those folders, and they will remain intact.

iosNighthawk

Thanks! Made an edit to the flump parser so textures can be loaded by path instead of name only.