Animated Sprites & Scene Validation

July was the busiest month of the year so far, with eighteen releases from v2.2.1 to v2.3.8. The headline feature was the Animated Sprite: a new asset type that plays a sequence of frame images at a fixed frame rate, a lightweight alternative to Spine for walk cycles, explosions and other sprite-sheet style animations. You can create one from Import → Import Animated Sprite, or simply drag in a folder of numbered frames (frame_01.png, frame_02.png…) and zStudio detects it automatically and imports the frames in order. The Attributes panel shows a frame grid with play and stop, FPS (12 by default), adding, removing and reordering frames, looping, and play-on-start. Scene validation also arrived: zStudio can write a snapshot of the scene hierarchy so your code can check that the containers it references still exist after a designer edits the scene, and by the end of the month it also flagged missing Spine animations and skins. The Hierarchy panel learnt to reorder: drop a layer just before or after a sibling to move it, not only inside another container, and undo it if you change your mind. Nine-slice borders can now be set in the Sprite inspector, including by dragging the edges, and the change carries across every instance of the template. The Particle inspector gained spawn shapes (rectangle or ring), move paths and blend modes, and older particle configs are upgraded to the current format when they load. Import → Reload All Images refreshes every image from disk, so edits made in another app show up without reopening the scene. zStudio also started reporting crashes automatically, and asks you to sign in again when your session expires instead of failing quietly. Watermarked exports were dropped from the pricing plans, and new video tutorials covered animated sprites, scene validation and reloading every image in the project folder. Outside the editor, zStudio was listed on Launchstag and tools.cafe, and the website gained an llms.txt file so AI assistants can understand what zStudio is.