Spine: 2D skeletal animation engine

[LostAndFound]

Hi guys,

Have you seem this software for 2D animation using bones and targeted to game engines? Its name is Spine: http://esotericsoftware.com/

If you Google you can find everybody out there is excited about his kind of tool, basically because animating using bones is too easy. I have seen comments from Corona, Gideros, Moai, LÖVE, coco2d, Construct, Starling, etc. forums. I am sure if AS adds in some way this feature, ability to export for game engines, a new universe will be opened.

Regards

Learner

[Víctor Paredes]

Very interesting. AS could easily make this kind of animation (layers bound to bones) and export it to an universal format. It would be awesome to work like this using Contruct or similar.

[neeters_guy]

Link is not working at the moment.

I wanted to mention that there seems to be few of these 2d animation tools designed for creating game assets out there, for example:

Spriter, The Ultimate 2D Game Animation Solution

It looks promising and it has a plug-in to work with Construct2. The pre-order price is a modest $25. Animation-wise you can do pretty much the same things in AS, but adding the game data export would definitely broaden its appeal.

[J. Baker]

Yes, code controlling your characters rotations and so forth does sound interesting but here's the thing. Instead of a simple code saying, go to next frame, you're now using more code to control your whole character. Which means the cpu usage will go up slightly more from calculating all rotations and movement. Now it may not be much, depending on how optimized the code is and how many characters you're controlling at once on screen but I find the, go to next frame, much more optimized.

The whole code controlling bones during runtime was so that your sprite sheet is smaller in size. But if you optimize your sprite sheets properly, this isn't a big deal at all.

[mixedup]

just starting to look into Spine myself...not sure if anyone knows answer to:

Assuming Spine offers separation of image assets from animation itself, then would this mean there would be less work than Anime Studio when you update your character? That is I'm assuming with Anime Studio when you start introducing different permutation of your characters for things like costumes/powerups (e.g. base character, character with backpack, character with jetpack on back etc) you would effectively have to re-export multiple image sheet outputs for each one, each time adjusting the character and what is visible for that permutation. Then I'm thinking with Spine you may just have to update the image aspects (not the animation file config) so it might be a faster process?

[SimplSam]

I have just played with Spine a little and I like it.

I think one of the primary design goals was to make the characters skinnable, so it would be easy to interchange identities and costumes etc.

Looking at the export data, there is the skeletal and animation data in additional to the sprite sheet.

Additionally they have the concept or Slots, which allow you to attach accessories to the the character, like jet packs, swords and strawberry ice creams

[wizaerd]

Most game engines provide attach points or some similar mechanism for sprites, so adding accessories can still be handled while leaving the original sprites as is. Of course this doesn't work well for clothing changes, but anything else such as weapons, shields, or other attachments are still handle available even if you use sprites. Spriter and Spine 2D do add a whole lot of additional overhead in order to accomplish what they do, which in the long run for your specific game may be totally worth it. However, if your characters in your game are going to remain simple, without any permutations, I would think Spriter and Spine 2D would be way overkill.

[mixedup]

I'm looking at Spine too... one big question, would Spine in fact make it a lot less effort catering for a game where for the character you want to:
a) have different characters
b) different costumes
c) powerup (objects - e.g. backback, jetpack etc)

I'm thinking that using spritesheets I may have to end up doing *lots*of animation sprite sheets, e.g. #animations x #characters x #costumes x #powerups/attachments. i.e. lots of permutations. Also when you want to change something too then having to redo all the animations for the different permutations.

With spine I think I just do the cost elements once & then change programmatically right? So from a saving development time (not performance) it seems almost a given Spine would assist a lot? (or am I missing something)