Request: Spine official support

Anaxtasia

I bet this is a recurring topic but... well, I'd REALLY like to see it happen.

As things are today Spine is the best 2D animation software out there. I know about other upcoming contenders, but anyone serious about making his toons look superb is using it.

At the same time I'm not a professional programmer, not even an amateur one, so I've chosen AC because of its many features related to moving characters across the screen and other nifty things like point & click player movement, which I wouldn't know how to script by myself.

In fact, I'm using PlayMaker to do everything in my game development. That's my current level...

That said... yes, I know there are other threads about Spine integration in these forums. I've read everyone of them and tried everything that my poor technical literacy managed to understand, but to no avail. I am able to make cutscenes for moving NPC's around, but I can't integrate point & click player movement.

I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, yes, but even if I were to do everything ok and get that thing to work, well... I still would like to see a more straightforward way to do the same thing from AC, directly.

It's my fault for not have checked its support before I committed my development to its movement system. I saw the word 'custom' and took it for granted that it would work out of the box with little tweaking. I wasn't particularly cautious, yes.

Even then my humble request is to add support for Spine. It would mean a world to me and, I'm sure, to many people out there.  ;-)

Thanks for reading me.

Alverik

Umm.. that would be nice... but to get that to work properly for every situation would take lots and lots of work... that's why there's already a few asset's whose sole focus is spine integration. Spine after all it's not a third party unity plugin, it's a third party software application... Keeping that up to date would also require a considerable amount of work... but I don't know, maybe something really basic, or an integration with a unity plugin which actually integrates to spine would be more feasible? I do like the idea of getting integrations with cool 2D animation apps (I decided to pursue 3D instead because I didn't want to do some of the 2D animation from scratch, and I find 3D easier), but I don't think it would be good for the asset if Chris spent all of his time improving only that...

...Anyway, now that we are talking about spine. From someone who likes graphics in general to another, have you seen live2D Cubism? It works similar to Spine but has a much more Morph/blend shape oriented workflow, similar to animation in 3D graphics. Currently it's known more on japan, but damn it's cool stuff. 

Edit: what the... Why do I remember there being more assets that dealt with spine, I can only find one now..

ChrisIceBox

Adding official support to any asset, not least a third-party app, creates a liability and dependency on my part because of the added requirement to maintain it as the other asset is updated.  If the supported asset gets changed, the integration breaks and then AC becomes "officially" broken.  AC provides official support for a number of such assets, but unfortunately it's not feasible to add more - and there are those that are already supported that have become a problem over time.

There's also the fact that, especially in the case of complex assets such as this, even an official integration won't be able to cover all bases, and some amount of tweaking or custom coding will be required to get the exact behaviour that each game uniquely needs.

Thirdly, while Spine is indeed a great tool, there are many such assets out there - and so there really will be no line drawn if all those that people value are given official support.

For these reasons, AC now adopts the approach of empowering users with the ability to write their own integrations.  With tutorials, sample third-party integrations such as 2D Toolkit support, Section 12.5 of the Manual, the scripting API, and the wiki, the hope is that this enough for users to write their own bridge scripts that link AC with whatever they want.

That said, I do appreciate that this is not ideal if you are not a coder - however this is a friendly community, and if you have questions about the integration threads already posted here, please feel free to ask - I'm sure you will get some assistance.

Anaxtasia

Well, I appreciate the responses. :-)

And I understand you have a lot of work to keep up this monster running, Chris.

Also, if you were to add support for Spine runtimes you would be an exception, not a rule. It was astonishing for me to discover that there is almost no assets for/made with Spine in the Asset Store. And that one that Alverik mentions is a converter to 'native' Unity animations, which is almost an heretic thing to do, because you lose all the flashy gimmicks in the process! 

Not even PlayMaker has any official support in the form of actions. Not even in its Ecosystem. I was able to download some fan-made actions from a forum, but they didn't work as expected.

So I've resourced to manual ways as you suggested. It's not an ideal solution but your scripts have a lot of exposed properties and methods, so I should be able to manage.

Thank you.

tomtomterrific

Hi Chris, I just wanted to echo my wish for some support of spine 2D. It'll likely be early 2020 before getting to a point of importing production spine work into an AC project. I love AC and would love to have some support to combine spine with AC. Thanks for listening! Tom

ChrisIceBox

Please don't double-post - I've replied to your other post in the "Extending the Editor" thread.

An integration can be found on the AC wiki.

tomtomterrific

My apologies, thank you for the reply.