KSE 0.1 released !

I just finished fixing the blocker bugs for the open source assets' manager KSE, and I pushed a release there : https://github.com/MathieuDuponchelle/Kerious-Resource-Editor on the branch 0.1.

I recorded this screencast to make a demo of the features included in this release.

I want to say thank you to Simon Corsin for his work on the windows port and manual management.

I'd be glad to see pull-requests on github, or comments, critics and feature requests here.

Here is the text of the video for those with no audio:

Hi, my name is Mathieu Duponchelle and I am glad to present you the first release of kse, which is
a tool to simplify asset's management written in python.

This release covers spritesheet creation, sprite naming, automatic sprites detection in an existing spritesheet,
animation referencing and tons of other stuff.

Spritesheet creation.

Let's create a new spritesheet, and start importing resources.
First we create what we call an "atlas", specify its width and height and the location of the resulting file.
Then we can specify the size we wish the next sprite to have, and start adding sprites by double-clicking.
Next step is to start naming all these sprites, for now the naming part is a bit tedious, but it works.

Animation referencing.
Another cool feature of KSE is that we can reference animations easily, using multiple selection.
Let's say these sprites belong to the same animation.

We now save the project, and have a look at the xml that was produced.

We can see that a simple xml parser could easily extract coordinates for a given name, here X.

Automatic sprite detection.

Let's now say that we want to use an already existing spritesheet. I have this one, which will make for a good
demonstration.
A really cool feature is automatic sprite detection, which can be configured with this button.
Match-size will specify the desired width and height multiples for the resulting sprites.
Now let's try it out !
As you can see, KSE detected the sprites and automatically highlighted them. However, if the position or size
of any sprite does not match what we intend, we can easily resize and move them using the mouse or, if we want
a more fine-grained control the comboboxes that we have here.


Conclusion.

With some friends of mine, we already developed a space shooter using KSE.
This helped me finding out the features that were most needed.
It can greatly improve the collaboration between designers and developers, by reducing the number of back and forth
trial and errors, allowing the programmer to only parse the xml file looking for the sprite or the animation name,
and thus not having to hardcode coordinates, which is an obvious advantage, and allowing the designer to try things
without having to modify the code or asking the programmer to do so.

KSE now works on both linux and Windows, it has not been tested on OSX yet.

My thoughts for future features are listed in the poll on the right-hand side of the blog, don't hesitate to comment if you have other ideas/remarks/critics. Thanks for watching !