For anyone trying to understand this better, jump to the Help introduction:

https://spritestack.io/editor/help/#introduction

It helps at least a little.

But unfortunately this is yet another site where the home page doesn't seem to give much context if you're not already part of whatever community it is. (What's sprite stacking? How is it different for a voxel editor? What need does this site meet that hasn't been met by other things?)

Thanks! This is exactly a feedback you will not hear from your niche that's already familiar with the subject. I will improve the landing page.

Any plans to open-source this? The open-source game development community desperately needs better tools :)

is there not enough tools? what do you miss?

As far as I know, the available open-source tools that are suitable for producing pixel art, are strictly flat-2D-only.

Not that you can't do 3D pixel art with them, but they certainly won't help you get there.

Edit: I just realized that maybe your question is broader than just pixel art. Open-source game development in general is a very underserved field; in terms of integrated game development environments, the best option I know of is Godot, and that's still miles behind a tool like Unity in terms of capabilities.

Audio production tools aren't great either, none of them integrate particularly well with the few game development tools that do exist. Good texture generators are difficult to come by; I believe Blender does have some functionality to this end, but it's not very accessible.

In terms of 3D modelling, Blender is decent, but suffers from bad UX (although that's being increasingly fixed, so that's great!).

I'm not aware of any production-ready general-purpose release/infrastructure tooling existing that's equivalent to something like Steam Workshop.

In short... there are basically almost no good, accessible open-source tools for game development, no matter what aspect of the process you look at.

> As far as I know, the available open-source tools that are suitable for producing pixel art, are strictly flat-2D-only.

There are plenty of voxel editors out there:

https://ephtracy.github.io/

I'm not sure how "stacked sprites" differ from voxels, since this appears to be the same technique Westwood used in it's voxel engine; but voxels are the traditional "3d" pixel art.

That voxel editor isn't open-source either, though.

Hopping into the editor and throwing down a couple pixels makes sense, but once I get to the "extrude" part to make it 3D, I don't understand the controls. It's not intuitive at first play.

I would suggest having the demo editor load a familiar shape, perhaps a house or a boat, to allow me to modify the object which is already in 3D space. That might help me understand the controls better (unsure).

Hello there. Thank you for sharing the first experience. I will put example models in welcome screen. There are also a few very short tutorial videos on the help screen. https://spritestack.io/editor/help/#the-basics

This is cool... accessibility is rather limited though. Appears the only way to freely rotate is with a middle mouse button my laptop doesn't have.

This is made by Przemysław Sikorski (Rezoner), pretty famous IO indie game developer (wilds.io, wanderers.io etc) with a unique art style that's reflected in this tool.

I learned about this technique from 2kliksphilip [1] early last year. I've always wanted to use this technique in a game, so I'm excited that there is a tool for it!

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjFlIxGzABY

How is this different from any other voxel editor?

It appears to just be a stack of 1 pixel high sprites you draw one at a time, like a 3D printer might extrude.

...I mean, fair enough, but don’t invent a whole new word for a concept that already exists unless it’s actually different?

It is a voxel editor. Except the voxel is represented by one pixel while in software like Magica the voxel is a 3d cube. The display is achieved by sprite stacking which means layering flat images on top of each other to give a 3d illusion. It's less capable than any other 3d method but it can be used in a 2d engine with zero 3d knowledge.

It’s different in that you can render voxel objects in a 2D renderer in a limited fashion. Whether that’s useful depends a lot on your context and aesthetic goals. Sprite stacking isn’t a new term for it either. But I agree a sprite stack could just be an export option in a regular voxel editor.

It isn't. I wrote a "sprite stack" exporter for VoxelShop (an open source voxel editor) a while back.

https://github.com/simlu/voxelshop

To me, sprite stacking isn't a new word... just google sprite stacking 3d and you'll find lots of old racing games, for example.

> you'll find lots of old racing games

You raised my hopes, but of course we have different googles now.

In a voxel editor you edit a 3D world using the smallest unit as cubes/spheres/etc. in 3D space. This is a 2D pixel editor with "stacks" of sprites.

But technically this is a "voxel editor" - because originally "back in the day" - voxel engines (those few that existed) rendered everything with pixels.

With a bit of googling, you can find some of these engines - here's a start - Ken Silverman's VoxLap (if you don't know who he is - then I haz a sad):

http://advsys.net/ken/voxlap.htm

Note that these are not "small 3D cubes" - they are literally just pixels. It was a technique that was explored in the 1990s during the whole DOOM era, but machines weren't able to render fast enough, and 3D cards just kept getting better - and here we are today.

Again - you can find more than a few of these examples from the time, but the tech of the day just wasn't fast enough.

Editors for voxel objects didn't exist - but they didn't really need to, because regular 3D editors could create the objects.

Which makes me wonder how well those old engines would work today, if this "sprite stacking" thing works well. As I recall back then, the demos I recall seeing weren't terrible, they just weren't up to the performance levels needed for a game engine...

EDIT: Some more detail and history:

https://killscreen.com/articles/meet-the-voxel-pixel-cousin-...

Isn't the stack then just the third dimension of the original two dimensions?

It is, e.g. I think tools like MagicaVoxel can construct a voxel object based on a stack of sprites, as you describe.

However, not every engine supports 3d models / voxels, so sprite stacking is commonly used in combination with engines that only support 2d, by simply drawing each layer on top of the previous one but one pixel higher on the y axis.

Note, stacking pixels is exactly how most volume rendering works.

Source: was an expert in rendering CT and MR data.

This is really cool. How can I rotate the figure in order to draw on the back?

There's some hot keys but you need a middle mouse button: https://spritestack.io/editor/help/#hotkeys

shift+a, shift+d

Is there going to be an editor for composing these into a larger map?

Yes although for now my priority is to find a proper way to implement animations.

Very nice work. I really like it.

The scroll controls are very difficult to use on OSX with a track pad. It scrolls 3 or 4 levels at once. And I wish it had undo.

Neat tool! Remembered the good old days where I used to make fake 3D in Adobe Flash using this very technique :)

This is cool. Would love to see it as a downloadable standalone app!

I am working on that.

I am missing what formats it supports for exporting.

It exports turntable animation gifs and spritesheets in png

on top of what u/feiss said I am also working on a 3d export so you can dabble with it in other software