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Opening, saving and exporting

Your files #

Fast's own file is .lsprite. It keeps everything: layers, elements, frames, palettes, cycles, slices, references, puppets and the view you left. A file written by Fast opens in later versions, and anything in a file that this version does not understand is written back out unchanged.

Opening #

File > Open... (Ctrl+O), drag-and-drop onto the window, or double-click in Explorer. It reads:

Saving an opened picture asks where the .lsprite goes: the image it came from is never written over. A photograph with thousands of colours is refused with the suggestion to import it as a reference.

Tabs: every file opened or made goes in a tab beside the work rather than over it (a blank, untouched document is simply replaced). Ctrl+Tab steps through them, Ctrl+W closes one. A file already open is shown, not opened twice. File > Open recent lists the last ones.

Saving #

• Save (Ctrl+S), Save as... (Ctrl+Shift+S), Save a copy... (writes somewhere else without changing which file you are editing).
• Saves are atomic: a file is written whole or not at all, so a failure never leaves half a sprite.
• Closing a tab or quitting asks about every document with unsaved work.

Recovery #

While you have unsaved changes, a copy of the document is written every couple of minutes into the program's settings folder. It is never written over the file you are editing. The copy is deleted when you save properly or close normally, so a copy found at startup means the last session ended badly. Fast offers it: Open loads it as an unsaved document (you choose where it really goes), Discard throws it away, Later leaves it for next time.

File > Autosave turns it off, or Write a copy now. The interval is in Preferences (Autosave a copy every...).

Exporting #

Export compiles at export quality, leaves your document untouched, and exporting is not saving.

• File > Export PNG writes one picture at 1x to 16x. Scaling duplicates whole pixels, never interpolates. Indexed writes a colour table and one byte a pixel, with the palette's slots in their order as the table's first entries: slot 3 is index 3. A game that swaps palettes at run time swaps the table.
• File > Export animation... writes the selected cycle in its loop mode, or every frame, as an animated GIF (plays everywhere; 256 colours a frame and no partial transparency; the status line says if a frame was reduced), an animated PNG (every colour and every level of transparency exactly), a lossless animated WebP, or a numbered PNG sequence.
• File > Export sheet... lays the frames into one image: a grid, a row or a column, at a whole-number scale, from the selected cycle or every frame. Border and spacing keep a texture filter from bleeding one frame into the next; Trim cuts every cell to the smallest rectangle holding anything any frame draws (one rectangle for all, so the cells line up). Beside it goes a small .json naming each cell's position and hold, the frame names, the cycles and the slices, in Fast's own layout or in the JSON Aseprite writes (keyed or listed), which game-engine importers built for Aseprite already read.
• File > Export again (Ctrl+Shift+E) repeats the last export to the same file with the settings as they are now.

Every cell of a sheet is byte-for-byte what exporting that frame alone gives.

Palettes #

Load and Save in the Palette panel read and write .gpl, .hex, .pal and .act. See Colour and palettes.

From the command line #

The free download (not the Store version, which has no command-line alias) exports without a window, for a build script:

sprits_fast --export hero.aseprite --to hero.gif --scale 4 --cycle walk

The extension of --to says what is written: .png is one frame (--frame N), or with --sheet a sprite sheet and its description (--border, --spacing, --trim, --json hash or --json array), --sequence a file per step, --animated an animated PNG; .gif is the animation; .webp is one frame, or with --animated the animation; .lsprite converts an .aseprite, PNG or GIF to a document; .gpl, .hex, .pal or .act writes the palette. The exit code is 0 for success, and a failure says why.

This is the guide that ships inside the program (F1).