Sprite Folders?
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You get the name, when going to the new sprite menu, you should be able to add a folder so that you can organize sprites better, this would make forkable (shared) games a lot easier to manage.
not the sharpest knife in the drawer :D
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@jd131111 That’s a pretty good idea
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Do you mean creating a folder in the sprite panel below the stage? So instead of showing individual sprites, we show a folder that contains multiple sprites? Similar to folders of apps on your phone?
It seems this would only be useful when there are many sprites in a project, right?
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@info-creaticode
Not really, it’s useful for collected rig parts of a sprite, like arms, legs, and many more. There’s a ton of uses for this. I can give more examples if needed (like enemies, items, walls, etc.)you're just jealous the voices are talking to me and not you
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@catty enemies items and walls should (most of the time and in my experience) be clones of a sprite (one enemy sprite or almost one sprite per enemy type, same with items and walls), I would say yeah for rigging since I typically am somewhat reluctant to make new sprites (I don’t really know why, I just tend to not make new sprites for a lot of stuff)
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That’s an interesting example. Can you provide an example project with rigged parts of a sprite? And explain how this “folder” feature would help? Thank you.
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@info-creaticode another example could be if somebody makes a set of sprites that can be put into another project to do various stuff (sprites to help debug or test stuff, example snippets in sprites, sprites with code for common functions or an engine like thing, etc) so its quicker to import and doesn’t get mixed up with the rest of your project
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@info-creaticode Folders for sprites could have many uses, but I think they are purely for visual organization, and would help a ton in projects where you have a lot of similar sprites that you don’t want to condense.
A common (and bad) Scratch practice, at least one that I had, is to make like 5000 sprites for buttons and/or menus. I was too lazy to use clones and costume detection (although I could) and many other Scratchers also might not know how to do that. I think it would really help new users to realize the potential of what they can do more because they won’t feel super cluttered or disorganized when they see they have ~30 sprites. I mean that number of sprites is not needed at all, but it’s fine as new users are still learning the layout. I’ve been demotivated in the past on working on Scratch projects after taking a break, and coming back later and having a hard time because the sprite layout was so messy. I did use comments, but when you have an engine and two or more sprites complement each other, it gets harder to maintain.
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@info-creaticode also scratchaddons.com has a feature like this to visualize it:
However there should be a stronger indicator that a sprite is a part of a folder rather than just color (in this case green), because that would confuse colorblind people, so maybe a little nested thing to open and close a sprite folder could work out too?#LLJW
<span style="color:white;background-image:linear-gradient(to right, lightblue, navy)">My name is Jeff</span> -
Thank you all for the inputs. This is becoming a non-trivial feature update. To summarize what has been discussed so far:
- The ‘folder’ is a group of 1 or more sprites. It helps organize sprites when there are many sprites in a project.
- Users can create/delete/rename a folder
- A folder’s skin will be some preview of sprites in it.
- Users can drag a sprite into a folder
- Users can open a folder, then the sprite pane will only show the sprites in that folder and no other sprites. At this point, the user should be able to move a sprite out of this folder. Also, there needs to be a way to go back to the upper level so all sprites and folders are shown.
- Users can export a folder into a file, which would contain all the sprites in it, and then upload it to another project as a new folder.
Some remaining questions:- There is only one level of folders (i.e. a folder can not contain another folder)? One level will be much simpler.
- Can a user duplicate a folder? probably no need to support this
- Can a folder be put into the backpack? maybe not needed
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@info-creaticode I agree with all of the remaining questions, but 2 and 3 seem like they could just be added for extra convenience, because exporting folders is allowed, and backpacking something serves the same purpose but instead of putting it on your laptop it puts it in your backpack storage, and duplicating a folder would make sense to add as well because even if it wasn’t supported, one could duplicate a folder by exporting it and importing it into the same project.
#LLJW
<span style="color:white;background-image:linear-gradient(to right, lightblue, navy)">My name is Jeff</span> -
But what happens when you duplicate a folder? We make a copy of all sprites in the original folder, and rename them as well? When would this operation be useful?
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@info-creaticode I’m not sure, I would say for extra convenience but you bring up a good point. I think just being able to backpack folders is neccessary then since it allows you to have more control of having the same sprites in multiple projects, and would also be useful for the upcoming code snippet library.
#LLJW
<span style="color:white;background-image:linear-gradient(to right, lightblue, navy)">My name is Jeff</span> -
If you can export the folder than import it in another project, it is less necessary to make the backpack support it, right? This should be a fairly rare operation after all.
Also, for the snippet library feature, it will only suppose a stack of code blocks, not sprites or folders, right?
