What happened to tag data?

My old Linux laptop just died, so I’m re-building things on a new computer. I downloaded the latest version of Aseprite (1.2.34.1-x64) from itch and it starts and works great.

When I re-run my sprite export to build my spritesheet, it seems all the tags no longer export their data fields. And it looks like, in the GUI, there’s no place in the tag to associate custom data anymore. Is that right? When did this get removed?

I was using that custom data to indicate which animations need to only run once. This isn’t something I can store in the cel data because I use the same cel in multiple tags (doors opening and closing, for example).

So I guess this is part help and part feature request – am I just missing something and the tag user data moved elsewhere? If it’s really gone now, is there any other way currently built-in to Aseprite to solve this problem?

If not, I guess that’s the feature request part: maybe extending animation direction could do it, like “forward once” and “reverse once”? Those both sound kind of weird to me.

I’d very much like to keep this data all in one place, inside the .ase files and accessible from Aseprite. Failing that, I think I have to keep track of which animations on which sprites only run once. It’s not terrible, just kind of clunky. Makes me miss the tag data; why was it removed? I went looking through past blog posts but didn’t see any notification of it.

How are other people solving this problem?

I’ve just been prefixing my tag names with Loop_ to indicate that an animation should loop (I usually have fewer loops than non-loops). This always seemed simpler to me than getting to the user data fields, and it’s easier to see on the timeline which animations loop and which don’t.

It would be nice to get loop/non-loop as options on the tags themselves though! I’d also like an option for the preview window to still loop non-looping animations, but add delays to the first and last frames, so that it’s easier to preview non-looping animations without modifying their frame durations.

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I ended up hard-coding the sprite and tag names that didn’t loop into my game. I was hoping for a more data-driven approach. I’m searching the forums for a “tag data” feature to vote for; if I can’t find it, I’ll add it, vote for it, and link it here.

Thanks for your help!

I found this ancient topic and added my vote: Add description field to tag + export to JSON

It’s funny, cuz I’m pretty sure the feature was added and then removed in that time. :smile:

I think sprite and tag user data are features in 1.3 beta. For both sprites and tag properties windows, you have to click on the button to the right of the name field to expand the GUI. If Aseprite doesn’t warn you about the loss of data when you open a file with 1.3 features in 1.2 stable, that might be something to request.