Yeah – three updates, one post.  Nothing major to report on, these updates contained a lot of behind-the-scenes changes (mainly for error tracking and whatnot).

I also threw in Amazon ads on top of the (Google) Admob ads I already had implemented (this was to comply with Amazon for their Developer Select program).  You shouldn’t notice a difference, just some different ads on startup (free version only, of course).

As for the ios version, I finally have my Mac Mini and everything set up.  As soon as I’m done with these posts I’ll start getting my work environment functional.

More updates!

Updates 1.1.4 and 1.1.5 were targeted at fixing a rare issue that some devices had with constructing large FrameBuffer objects (they are used to display the onion skin and to export the animation).

These devices would fail when attempting to construct these objects, and as a result the app would crash.

This fix also does some tweaking behind-the-scenes for normal users, as well.  Memory usage should go down a bit since I’ve changed the pixel-format these FrameBuffer’s used as well as halved their overall size.

In other news, I should finally have a Macbook in my possession on Friday, so this weekend will be spent porting Stick Nodes to IOS!

This is the first update that introduces a new feature!  This new feature is called panning mode.

When panning mode is enabled, you can no longer move individual stickfigures or their limbs.  Instead, you are now able to move all stickfigures on the current frame at the same time by dragging around on the canvas area.  This should be an incredibly useful feature for when it would normally become tedious to move many stickfigures every frame.  It can also help you better position stickfigures that are moving outside of the canvas area, since this was normally difficult due to the size constraints of the touch area.

I was originally going to call this “camera mode” and also allow the user to scale all of the stickfigures on the current frame (by pinching the canvas area).  I temporarily scrapped this feature due to two main issues I found:

1. Scaling the stickfigures isn’t a big deal, but what if a limb uses its own scaling – it wouldn’t scale along with the rest of the figure.  I’d have to iterate through each node on the stickfigures and scale them too to be sure this doesn’t become an issue.
2. There is a minimum and maximum scale amount allowed.  What if a user uses camera mode to scale out while one stickfigure on the frame is already at the minimum threshold?  It can’t get any smaller – but I don’t want all of the other stickfigures around it to scale while it stopped scaling.

Like I said though, I temporarily scrapped this feature.  I didn’t want to waste time playing around with getting it working since this update also included some bug fixes and tweaks.  Plus, with my Macbook about to arrive, I want to have a clean slate to begin porting Stick Nodes over to ios, which is probably what the next update is going to be about!