Hey guys, I’m Nate, co-author of libgdx and a number of OSS projects. I just wanted to drop in to spread the good word about a game development tool I’ve been writing with my good friend, Søren. I’m the programmer and he’s the artist. The tool is called Spine and is used to build 2D skeletal animations specifically for games.
We are doing a Kickstarter and passed our intial goal in just 3.5 days! Two of our initial goals were for Unity: support for both Futile and 2DToolkit. So we’ll do both of those, for sure. We now have ~13 days left and we’ve just posted stretch goals, which include a bunch of cool features.
This looks awesome. Think I have to get it, because, well, I just don’t want to not have that. =)
Edit: Pledged. Best of luck with this Nate, have looked for something like this a few times in the past but never found anything I wanted, until now. Can’t wait to try it out.
That looks pretty sweet, and I think the pricing is great.
What about people making 2D games without a pre-made framework, though? I’m super interested in this, but so far haven’t used a 3rd party 2D framework and don’t plan on it. Having such dependencies would be a pretty big negative for me, personally.
Great work, though, and congrats on the successful Kickstart!
Thanks Seven. The Corona runtime is already done. We’ve been working on the cocos2d runtime, which will be available next. If forced to give a date I’d say that’ll happen within a week or two, if not sooner. After that will be Unity Futile, which I expect won’t be too hard. I’ve already spoke a bunch with Matt Rix, the Futile author. After that will be Unity 2DToolkit, which honestly I don’t yet have a firm grasp on how much work that will take. These 4 toolkits I just mentioned are the original goals of the Kickstarter and will be done first, before any stretch goals (except for a few small features we’ve already finished). TLDR; we working hard and Unity will be done ASAP, Futile first then 2DToolkit.
Pledged! After being disappointed about the lack of Unity support for Spriter (among other little things) I’m really looking forward to Spine. It’s great that you guys have chosen to support the game toolkits yourself instead of relying on the community for those. I have been playing around with Spine and everything works awesome. Great job!
Now, if only more people would pledge, we can get some of those oh so juicy stretch goals. Bounding boxes, integrated texture packer and free-form deformation? Yes please! Come on people, only 6 more days to go! Spread the word!
Thanks guys! Only 7 hours left then the Kickstarter is over. Last chance to get a license at a big discount! Remember, you get all future updates for free.
Oh, cool, didn’t know Unity had pretty charts like that. Glad to hear I didn’t have any allocations! Unity requires the mesh’s arrays to be exactly the size needed. This means if you hide or show an attachment it will allocate to draw a different number of quads. I was thinking that we could zero the values for unused quads, possibly up to some threshold.
Bah, looked interesting so thought I might try backing it, only to discover it finished months ago
It does look good though and I’m pleased it doesn’t depend on any other Unity plugin’s. Though integrated support with other 2D plugins might be nice, it make sense that it can work standalone too.
@derkoi, sorry there is not currently proper documentation, but you can check out the example project. This is enough for you to playback and blend different animations. For more advanced usage you can use the C# API, eg:
GetComponent().skeleton.SetAttachment(“slot name”, “attachment name”);
Spine is really fantastic stuff, I absolutely love it. We bought it this week.
Unfortunately, It’s currently fairly slow for mobile in any serious project due to the unoptimised playback routines in unity. I’m not sure if it generates garbage or not since Unity seems to be all over the place tonight.
I am interested in rewriting this and sharing my findings, but before I am pushed to that last resort I’d like to know if anyone else here has plans to do so? If so, perhaps we could work together on it. Or perhaps the author will find the time to do so.
Generally the C# back end for spine is great, it’s just the unity part that could use improvement
Bounding boxes, integrated texture packer and free-form deformation? Yes please! Come on people, only 6 more days to go! Spread the word!
