Suggestions for the sprite editor

[eproasim]

I absolutely love the functionality of the Sprite Editor, but I have a few quality of life improvements that would eliminate a heap of frustration:

1. Navigating around the sprite sheet is a bit of a pain as I’ve gotten used to the main editor and most of my other programs allowing me to pan with middle click. The current way the Sprite Editor adjusts the view based on zoom direction as the only means of navigation is a bit cumbersome, even with the “Focus on Selection” button.

2. Sometimes I know how big the frame of my sprite should be, but dragging the edges of the frame to land exactly where they should can be a bit difficult because of the transparent background grid. The ability to move a selected frame with the arrow keys would simplify the placement process significantly as I could just monitor the changes in the sprite preview.

3. Speaking of the transparent background grid, with fading elements of a sprite sheet, a solid color background would be really useful, but of the three suggestions here, I think this one is the least important to me.

I hope this feedback is useful. I think the editor is great, and I love the new features!

[yaustar]

@eproasim

• Navigating around the sprite sheet is a bit of a pain as I’ve gotten used to the main editor and most of my other programs allowing me to pan with middle click. The current way the Sprite Editor adjusts the view based on zoom direction as the only means of navigation is a bit cumbersome, even with the “Focus on Selection” button.

You can hold Shift to pan with the mouse at the moment but yes, middle click to pan would be very nice!

@eproasim

Sometimes I know how big the frame of my sprite should be, but dragging the edges of the frame to land exactly where they should can be a bit difficult because of the transparent background grid. The ability to move a selected frame with the arrow keys would simplify the placement process significantly as I could just monitor the changes in the sprite preview.

Can you expand on this a bit more. Would the arrow keys move the whole frames?

@eproasim

Speaking of the transparent background grid, with fading elements of a sprite sheet, a solid color background would be really useful, but of the three suggestions here, I think this one is the least important to me.

Oh yes, this would be handy!

On a separate note, we have an exporter for Texture Packer that can make it a lot easier to handle a sprite sheet since you can import the sprite layout.

GitHub - playcanvas/playcanvas-texturepacker: Custom PlayCanvas exporter for TexturePacker

[eproasim]

@yaustar

@eproasim

• Navigating around the sprite sheet is a bit of a pain as I’ve gotten used to the main editor and most of my other programs allowing me to pan with middle click. The current way the Sprite Editor adjusts the view based on zoom direction as the only means of navigation is a bit cumbersome, even with the “Focus on Selection” button.

You can hold Shift to pan with the mouse at the moment but yes, middle click to pan would be very nice!

!!! Thank you for this tip. That alone is very helpful.

@yaustar

@eproasim

Sometimes I know how big the frame of my sprite should be, but dragging the edges of the frame to land exactly where they should can be a bit difficult because of the transparent background grid. The ability to move a selected frame with the arrow keys would simplify the placement process significantly as I could just monitor the changes in the sprite preview.

Can you expand on this a bit more. Would the arrow keys move the whole frames?

Yes! I will use paint.net’s selection move tool as an example. In paint.net you are able to move your selection area around pixel by pixel with the arrow keys. The coolest thing, for me, is that the undos don’t register every pixel transform, just the before and after. If we could move the entire defined frame (selection area) with the arrow keys it would make the final process of lining everything up much easier.

Edit: Thank you for the Texture Packer exporter. I plan on including Texture Packer into the pipeline for the next project, just haven’t gotten around to it yet, so doing everything manually!