Fellow Character Enthusiasts,

Version 1.4 was supposed to be launched on Monday, but due to a bug (2 files have been misnamed) some exports and an animation failed.

So we sped up and got everything ready sooner - enjoy!

Changelog

For some time now people wanted to have more tools available and we listened. Update 1.4 integrates the following tools into 8D: Broom, Fishing Rod, Water Can, Sickle, Hammer, Rake, Spade, Wood Axe, Pick Axe and a Lute. The best thing - all those tools are available for EVERY weapon animation as well, so there are a lot of new stuff you can create with these.

Locks, locks everywhere! Another thing we added are more locks. You are now able to lock each color (except those that don't get randomized anyway ie weapons + trail). This allows you to create more people within the same faction that have equal color schemes for their clothes. We switched the body type sliders over to dropdowns as well, allowing you to handle the changes more precisely.

Last but for sure not least: Minification! Let me explain.

When you export a character, spritesheets are created as PNG files (to have the needed transparency) and those are collected inside a ZIP file and offered to you as a download. Let's say you use the standard 8D Spritesheet export with one giant spritesheet, including every animation in every direction with 7 frame animations. That's a lot of stuff. This image is (at 400px our biggest resolution) 16800px x 15200px large and comes in at around 18.5MB - depending on the options you chose, cause more pixels mean a bigger filesize.

8D now directly minifies those files, saving you LOTS of space for your game and time, cause you don't need to minify the files somewhere external anymore. The standard option is set at 85% quality, which will bring the giant example spritesheet down to ~5.7MB which is incredible. Even if you set it to 100% it will come down to around 6.5MB. All those minifications are not really visible, cause PNG optimizations are considered lossless, unlike JPG or other image formats. All it does is limiting the number of colors used, but in a way noone really notices, unless of course you set the quality too low (which you can if you want, but I won't reccomend it).

This is some really big news and you for sure will want to reexport all your created characters to make use of the filesize savings! One minor con: After the export which can already take some time, depending on the amount of spritesheets your export the minification is adding a bit of extra time needed. Saving A LOT of loading time later on, this is more than worth it - trust me :)

Besides all those big changes we fixed some minor stuff and some layers that didn't look perfect yet. That's it for now. Enjoy the update and have a great weekend!

- cub3 (Florian)