Aseprite Point Tracker Script

This script generates json or xml files containing the coordinate values of a pixel on each frame as specified by a color, and sorts them by tags.

It's especially useful if you want to track specific points of your animation into game coordinates.

I made this very specifically to make the process for creating Hair Metadata files for Celeste Skin Mods way less tedious.

I also made this in a blur in one afternoon with no prior experience in Lua so don't expect the cleanest code under the hood.

Install Guide

1. Download pointTracker.lua and put it in Aseprite's scripts folder (File > Scripts > Open Scripts Folder).
2. Then click "Rescan Scripts Folder" to make it appear in the Scripts menu.
3. From there you can run it by clicking on "pointTracker".

Usage

• Tracking Layer - The layer that is being scanned
• Tracked Color - The color value that is being scanned for
• Origin - The origin point the coordinates are relative to (defaults to the top left corner of the sprite)
• Invert X and Invert Y - Don't remember why I added these tbh but they work
• Preset - I made this primarily to help with Celeste Mods but I did want to make it more generally useful so selecting "Celeste" configures the script for Celeste specifically
• Tag - The tag being scanned, if All Tags is selected it iterates through all tags in the order they are on the timeline
• Output File - The file being output to (defaults to the name "points")
• Generate - Generates the file

About the Output

Json files are organized as dictionaries of arrays of dictionaries (I swear this was the least insane way to sort this)

Example:

{ 
    "idle": [
        {"x": 10,"y": 21},{"x": 10,"y": 21},{"x": 10,"y": 21},{"x": 10,"y": 21}
    ],     
    "walk": [
        {"x": 10,"y": 20},{"x": 10,"y": 20},{"x": 10,"y": 19},{"x": 10,"y": 18}
    ]
}

So, if the json file was saved as a variable "example", to access the x position of the first frame in an animation "idle", you would need to get to example["idle"][0].x

Xml files are based directly off the the Celeste formatting

Example:

<Metadata>
    <Frames path="idle" hair="-4,-3|-4,-3|-4,-3|-4,-3|-4,-4|-4,-4|-4,-4|-4,-4|-4,-3"/>
    <Frames path="walk" hair="-4,-4|-4,-4|-4,-5|-4,-6|-4,-6|-4,-5|-4,-4|-4,-4"/> 
</Metadata>

Misc

You can ignore specific tags by starting them with "." (you can change this by changing ignoreChar in the code)

Limitations

• It only scans for the first instance of a matching pixel in each frame, you could modify it to record all of them, it just wasn't my goal
• It doesn't support multiple colors, the GUI doesn't support contextual menus and it was out of scope

Here is a link to the source code on Github for anyone curious.