Hi all,
I’ve just released a new post regarding Unity’s 2D animation tools. It’s mostly about my experience of trying a couple of different plugins and ending up with what I think it’s currently the best solution.
Let me know your thoughts!
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All I care about is 2D ragdolls. I have some awesome simple game ideas for mobile if I had ragdolls in 2D.
@calmcarrots You’re in luck then… @Fenrisul is working on it! 
Take a look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=UopOOYVj1gc#t=899
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I’m sweating
Thanks for this. Spine looks like it’s come a long way.
Would love to see what the performance is like. In particular, is it allocating any memory per frame?
We use SmoothMoves extensively now, which keeps allocations fairly low. But enough animations running at one time will still start to bog things down after a while.
Yes, it definitely came a long way since the first KickStarter.
The profiler is not showing any allocation per frame on Spine related classes. If you want to do some further testing you can always download the trial and see how it works for you. You’ll be limited to the example project they provide but it’s enough to get some conclusions.
One of my favourite aspects with Spine is that it simply exports a JSON file (and an atlas if you want). It’s then up to the runtimes to handle that data, and since all runtimes are open-source even if you find something wrong with it, you can always dig in and fix it yourself.
Last I heard of Spline, it was supposed to have native support for Unity, but there were issues with that. Are they fixed?
What do you mean by native support? You mean like an integrated editor or something? AFAIK, the Unity runtime is on par with all of the other runtimes. Some features in the Spine editor have not been integrated into any runtimes yet, such as IK.
I used SmoothMoves extensively for a long time. Now I use Spine. I optimized a few things under the hood (since the runtime is all open code) for my particular use case and was able to get ~240 skeletal characters with randomized body parts running around on screen on my Nexus 4.
PM me or message me on Skype (Fenrisul) and I can send you my bleeding edge stuff if you want ragdoll now to work from.
There are parts of Spine that don’t make sense to be “Native” in the sense of being integrated directly with Mecanim if thats what you mean… FFD in particular is a SoB to do with Mecanim even with blendshape support. The Unity AnimationCurve is also not the same type of curve as Spine’s.
In terms of more solid Unity Editor integration, I’m workin on it.
http://esotericsoftware.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3004
Others are working on more “Native” importers for Spine.
http://esotericsoftware.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3061