This number will be on the short side because I've been getting some of the numbers for next week. Still, a couple of interesting things did happen this week, starting with:

BitmapFlow

Bitmapflow is a tool to help you generate inbetweens for animated sprites. In other words, it makes your animations smoother. It uses optical flow to try to guess how the pixels move between frames, and blends them accordingly. The results are far from perfect, and probably require some editing by hand afterwards, but sometimes it can produce decent results.

Made by Bauxite, a game programmer and a Youtuber, using Godot, and it's just awesome.

I don't know what more to say than THANK YOU to the dev because with this tool, my crappy animation is going to be a little bit less crappy, and that's all I can ask from a tool, really.

It accepts gifs, sprite sheets, and separate frames, and it works pretty damn well, I have to say. I played around with it using some pixelfrog's assets, and it does exactly what was promised:

This one has some minor issues on the hammer handle, I think. But nothing 5 minutes on Aseprite won't fix.

Here's a video showing how to use the tool and what can you do with it:

The web editor goes PWA

In the latest Godot web progress report published this week was announced that the Godot web editor is now a progressive web app (it can be installed as an app on mobile devices)

Now, the reason I'm talking about this instead of just putting it on the news roundup for this week is because the editor also became one of the top posts on Hacker News for a few hours

The coolest part of the thread was the participation of Thomas Gullen, Construct co-founder:

(Disclosure, am founder of Construct 3, we made a browser based game engine: https://editor.construct.net)

Interesting to see this progress, and unlike the myriad of other web based software looks like they've done a pretty good job of making it feel native like in the browser. I don't feel too threatened by Godot's progress here, fortunately our engine occupies a fairly specific niche that doesn't overlap too much with Godot's market and would allow them to co-exist.

It does look a little heavy (12.5mb transferred/77mb resources to load cold) and is slower to load than I would expect. Doesn't appear like HTTP2 is supported which would probably speed things up nicely.

For anyone wondering what's the point of this, browser based software is incredibly beneficial to educational institutes especially in the Covid environment - we for example are getting educational institutes who typically use Unity and other software moving to us because it's far easier to get remote classrooms set up with their wide variety of devices students have at home.

I do think the future of software is in the browser. There are just so many advantages. Not to everyone's liking of course but I do feel it's inevitable. We went web only as it has the huge advantage of one code base to maintain, I would assume a large risk on Godot's part here is having to maintain multiple code bases.

Give the thread a read if you have the time. The discussion is interesting, at the minimum.

📰 Godot news round-up

Proposal - Improved Theme Editor

A proposal for an overhaul of the Theme editor.

Related pull requests: Refactor Edit Theme menu in Theme Editor and Refactor Create Theme menu in Theme Editor

The points for this proposal:

1. Add an items panel to the Theme editor UI. Its core features would be ease of use, simplified navigation, use of grouping and quick tools to create, rename or remove definitions.
2. Add a picker functionality to Theme editor previews. Controls available for preview can be selected and automatically opened in the items panel, providing a quick way to customize them. Tools to inherit/override specific properties of the base control should make the process intuitive.
3. Allow loading arbitrary scenes as previews. This way a UI designer can create a component zoo for the controls they use, fully controlling the content and the layout of the preview. Picker should work with it as well.
4. Add a quick custom preview builder. As an alternative to loading actual scenes, the builder can be used quickly create a mockup through visual means and configure available control to represent their specific states. Picker should work here as well.
5. The new items panel provides a way to pin a StyleBox as a "leader". Editing the leader StyleBox would change all the compatible StyleBoxes within the same type.

Tools - Aseprite 1.3 sneak peek

With Aseprite's permission, AdamCYounis, Youtuber, game dev, and pixel artist, made a video showing the future of Aseprite, currently on version 1.2.25.

Tools - Tiled 1.5 Released

You can read the changes on that link, or just watch Gamefromscratch's video:

This one is just an extra, but a couple of issues ago I mentioned Miziziziz's question on Twitter about the best practice for dialogue in a game.

Well, in the end, he decided to write everything on JSON files

If you have anything you want to share with the Godot development community please let me know by sending an email to contact@godotes.com