We’ve been building a lot of spritesheets and other images for use in HTML5 projects. To preserve alpha channels, you need to use PNG32, which can get pretty large for some types of content because it’s a lossless compression format.

I wanted to find a way to reduce these file sizes, so that games and other experience would load more quickly. Ultimately I settled on a solution that separates an image into two parts: a JPG with all of the RGB information, and a PNG32 with the alpha channel. In my testing, the end results vary wildly – some content is larger when split, but some content can see a reduction in size of up to 70%. This is can have a pretty significant effect when applied to a 2MB sprite sheet image!

To enable this, I added a utility method in EaselJS that takes these two images and merges them back into a single canvas, which can be used for sprite sheets, drawn to other canvases, added to the DOM, or used as an image source via toDataURL(). The great thing is, it runs REALLY fast (a few milliseconds for most large images), because it leverages composite operations.

var combinedCanvas = SpriteSheetUtils.mergeAlpha(rgbImage, alphaImage);


For initial testing, I prepared my images using Photoshop, but this was slow, time consuming, and cumbersome. To make the process easier, I wrote a simple AIR application codenamed “Omega” (as in, alpha and omega – such boundless wit!). It will prepare multiple images at a time, and display a report showing the original and total resulting sizes, so you can decide which assets to use it on.

It’s currently very barebones, and requires you to do everything via the command line. In some ways, this is kind of nice – you can create batch files or commands to quickly run it on specific files or folders of images – but I plan to add a UI soon. I’m also planning to open source it the not too distant future, but I thought I should share it in the interim so others can use it.

You can grab “Omega” here. It comes with a text file that describes all of the available arguments and shows some examples. It works great with Zoë or your spritesheet creation tool of choice.

One important note: if you’re using Omega on OSX, you’ll need to quit the application before running it a second time. For some reason AIR apps on OSX do not receive parameters with invocation events if they are already open.

We’re recently been working on some pretty cool CreateJS projects with heavy dependencies on sprite sheet animations. Our sprite sheet export tool, Zoë, does a pretty good job, but it’s limited to exporting the main timeline of a published SWF. To facilitate an efficient designer/developer workflow, we really needed a solution that would let us maintain a single FLA, containing multiple animated symbols, and export them to a single combined spritesheet.

We considered using the new export to spritesheet feature in CS6, but it was missing some features we needed. Zoë offers multi-image sprite sheets (important when exporting smaller sprite sheets for mobile compatibility), configurable smart frame reuse, and flexible registration point export for EaselJS. It’s also open source, so we could modify it to work the way we needed.

To facilitate this workflow, I wound up writing a (fairly) simple JSFL command called “Prep for Zoe”. It takes multiple symbols, copies them as Graphic instances, distributes them to the main timeline, and copies their labels appropriately. If no label is specified on the first frame of a symbol (or it is a bitmap), it will automatically add a label based on the symbol’s name. It will even warn you about duplicate labels. Finally, it publishes your FLA to generate an updated SWF.

The end result is a single SWF with all the animations and labels on the main timeline, which you can bring it into Zoë to export them all as a spritesheet.

To use it, you just place all of the symbols you want to include in a single guided layer on your stage then run the command. Your main timeline will be prepped for you, and the SWF will be automatically published. Need to make changes? Edit your guide layer, and run the command again – it will automatically delete all the old layers, rebuild the timeline, and export a new SWF.

By default, the registration point (aka regX/Y in EaselJS) for every symbol will be set at the symbol origin. It is represented in the built out timeline with an empty symbol instance named “registrationPoint”. If you want to set up custom registration points for each symbol, you can do so by putting each symbol on it’s own frame in the guide layer, and adding a “registrationPoint” instance for each. These registration points will be preserved in the prepared timeline. Check out the included “advancedExample.fla” file to see this in practice.

Once your SWF is ready, just bring it into Zoë, configure the settings as appropriate, and push “Export”. Once you set up a SWF once, Zoë will remember the settings for it, so exporting a new sprite sheet from your FLA is as simple as running Prep for Zoë to update the SWF, then running export in Zoë. Hand the updated image(s) and JSON data to a dev, and it’s ready to be integrated into a game or other experience.

You can grab the JSFL command here, including a couple of example FLAs to get you started. To use the command, either double click the JSFL file (this will immediately run it on the front-most FLA if Flash is open), or copy it into the Commands folder in your Flash config directory – it will then be available in the Commands menu. You can download Zoë here.

I’m excited to announce the launch of new versions of the CreateJS libraries and tools. CreateJS is a suite of open source libraries and tools to make it easier to build really rich, interactive experiences using modern web standards.

This release added a ton of new features, including masks, multitouch support, run time generated sprite sheets, and better support for fluid or multi-resolution experiences. We also refined functionality, fixed a bunch of bugs, and added tutorials on a number of major topics for EaselJS.

The biggest change, which you’ll want to be aware of if you’re going to migrate existing content to the new versions is that all classes are now in a configurable namespace. You can either use the default “createjs” namespace, switch it to something more convenient, or configure it to not use any namespace at all to retain compatibility with legacy content.

I’m hoping to write up a more detailed overview of this release when time permits – things are very busy here at gskinner.com!

You can grab the latest, and get more info about CreateJS at createjs.com.

This is a quick follow up to my previous post about disabling local security errors in Chrome on OSX.

I’ve been working a lot with command files lately and thought I would share a simple one that you can double-click in the Finder to launch Chrome with the -disable-web-security flag set. This lets you test content locally that uses “sandboxed” JS features like accessing the pixel data of local images. Handy when working with EaselJS.

This comes with the obvious warning that you probably shouldn’t surf the web in this mode.

You can download the command here. For it to work properly, you need to quit Chrome prior to running the command. You may also need to open it up in a text editor and change the path to Chrome if it’s somewhere other than /Applications, or you want to use this command with Chrome Canary.

Command files are pretty handy – they let you package Terminal commands into a file that can be double clicked in the Finder. Definitely worth learning about if you’re a developer on OSX. There are also .terminal and .term files, which provide similar functionality with a little more control, but they seem to have some issues in the current version of Terminal.