@AnimatorJiffy Apologies I forgot to comment back. Certainly. As I mentioned last year there was an implementation pending review, however it’s possible that there needs to be a heavy modification for it to be usable without lagging the software (which was the main problem back then IIRC)
Aside from this there are certainly other priorities as well. One could argue that a horizontal timeline is enough to get the animator by, so the xsheet is not critical in the priority list, unfortunately for us animators that grew up with traditional animation.
That is not to say that it won’t happen, it just won’t be as quick as you might surmise from the date of the previous replies. We honestly could use more help since we’re all volunteers here (we don’t even ask for donations; can’t handle them without a company or non-profit dedicated for that), but sadly most people either reinvent the wheel and make their own “easy to use” animation apps that become abandoned in mere weeks, or they go with larger projects only to get bored of the open source bureaucracy and lack of activity either way.
Pencil2D is slow, but it’s steady for sure. We are on a road to a mythical 1.0 version where we come it will be the program we all have wanted within realistic expectations and that it will be appealing enough for others to step in and contribute.
If you’re interested in keeping track of what is getting added you can visit the code repository here: Pull requests · pencil2d/pencil · GitHub
Out of the things that are being developed for up coming releases, these are the ones I know are active:
- Improved Status Bar (recently merged)
- New per keyframe / per layer opacity FX (non-destructive) + A simple fade in/out effect (already merged)
- action toolbars (for screen tablet users) This is pending review and to implement the ability to customize the options.
- New timeline actions. Copy / Cut / Remove multiple frames on the active layer (multi-layer is still not possible)
- New way to handle the camera + motion paths + easing presets (Camera Layer only, for now)
- Frame comments. Basically storyboarding slug info.
- Retiming feature. Add or reduce frames to match a specified framerate.
- Content repositioning tool. This would allow you to transform multiple drawings over time for simple corrections.
- New undo / redo implementation to improve undo and allow more options to be undoable + history panel (this is massive, was frozen for months and only recently it has been unlocked and split in parts to make it viable)
- New raster painting engine system with brushes (this one is a massive implementation, it has it’s own version for testing here MyPaint version pre-alpha preview - #209 by CandyFace)
- XSheet + Lipsync data import from papagayo files. This one is pending review and improving previous issues with severe lag but currently no one is assigned to it AFAIK.