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  • Spine Features: Kickstarter #2

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Nate wrote

Gear has a lot of logistics: need to have it made, ship it, plus the time that stuff takes from other things. We already "lose" from Amazon and Kickstarter fees and discounted licenses, don't want to add more overhead. We had a game showcase pledge the first Kickstarter but no one has ever wanted to use it. We'll give new rewards some more thought. Moo tricks could work! 😃

Thanks Adam! 🙂

I pledged for the showcase section (I think it was something like a special section on the site where completed games using Spine would have their own place), but my game isn't complete yet so... maybe in some months? 😃

I think it would be great to have it, like the libgdx one (albeit a little more organized).

Amazing new features!

I like Spine and I'm thinking about buying Spine Essential.
It says "The license includes all future updates to Spine Essential for life, without any additional charges."

Do these new features also count as updates, or is there a distinction between mayor and minor updates?
In other words, if I buy now, do I get those briljant new features of kickstarter 2 if they're finished without additional charge too?

Thanks!

@Friebel, you get all future updates to Spine Essential, but there will still be some features that are only in Spine Professional. The four new features for the Kickstarter (meshes, FFD, skinning, IK pinning) are only in Spine Professional.

Backed at the highest reward level! Let's go Spine!

Wish there were more rewards. Could you offer 2 licenses at a discount?

Thanks fallen! :party: We might add more rewards, but we'll wait a little while before making any changes.

Just to confirm (I'm a lazy bad idiot) as an early pro license purchaser (@$99) I don't need to back the upgrade option to get access to these highly desirably proposed features? I'd love to give you guys another $100, but I work in a call center (I like to refer to it as "drawing club with phones") to support this indy life. I can spare $50 though.

Thanks Sheado! I had missed your post somehow before. 🙂

@Louis, yep, if you already have Spine Professional then you will get the features. 🙂 Your download link will tell you what version you have. If you have the latest, it also says on the menu in Spine when you click the Spine logo in the upper left.

Nate I love this tool and its been a great help to us. I have one concern before I back though and that's how do you plan on implementing these features for the different runtimes? If you've discussed this somewhere else on the forums sorry I couldn't find it.

@Barry, is there a particular aspect of implementing the features that you'd like to discuss? Spine will export the data needed, the runtimes will load it and animate using it.

(Nate, you should stick a new blog post about the new Kickstarter on the old Kickstarter blog. It's a mailing list to the people who were interested in Spine already. And then they'll tell their friends too? :p )

I'm using a custom Cocos2D-iphone Objective-C runtime and am curious how you plan to implement the draw code for the new features especially FFD. I'm not asking for examples just some psuedo code or even planned techniques/technologies you hope to leverage.

For example, are you going to use shaders for FFD? Its probably very obvious how these features should be done but I'm still lacking in experience around these more advanced and very cool concepts.

Will meshes require we use your texture packer and have a new format to support them?

There's lots of lower level things that are very runtime dependant than have scratching my head and I'm sure you have some great approach to solving them I am just not seeing.

Ah, ok. 🙂

There will be a new class, MeshAttachment. This is similar to a RegionAttachment, but has a texture region, vertices, UVs, and triangles instead of a texture region, SRT, width, and height. The triangles are exported so runtimes don't need to worry about triangulation. The MeshAttachment is given a bone and computes world positions for the vertices. FFD is done by an animation timeline adjusting MeshAttachment vertices.

There will be another class, called something like SkinMeshAttachment. This extends (or is similar to) MeshAttachment and has a list of bones and weights per vertex. Instead of computing world vertices for a single bone, it does it for each bone and then uses a weighted average as the actual world vertices.

IK pinning doesn't affect the runtimes. It is the furthest away of the new features. At the very least it will be used to keep a bone tip in place for posing, like the opposite of the Pose tool. At most it will plot the IK movement during export, writing out the plotted keys.

Nate, would it be possible to drive FFD from a manually animated bone somehow? For instance when weapon aiming is done from within the game it would be nice to also have to possibility to use FFD.

@rosme : you might be talking about the Skinning feature?

@rosme, you could manipulate vertices via code instead of using an animation to do so. Skinning would make it easier though, then you just manipulate the bones and the skinning deforms the images.

I red on the kickstarter, that some runtimes won't work with the new features. We are on the first stages of developing our game, an chose Corona, which is one of the three runtimes that won't benefit from meshes or FFD.
We've been using Spine and we love it, so most likely we'll switch to some other package. Do you know if Cocos2d will support the new features? Anyone can recommend other options, based on experience?
Thanks!

@Pharan You are right. Reread the Kickstarter feature description and that's what skinning is for. Great!

@Onnevan, it doesn't look like Corona will be supporting anything but quads anytime soon. Back at our first Kickstarter they did mention they would want to support it, but nothing has happened since. Wouldn't hold your breath for it if I were you. As for a recommendation we recommend using libgdx. Spine is built upon libgdx so we are of course pretty biased 😉

Backed. Did you send out an email? I don't remember getting an email...

Hi Shiu!
I don't think this is the correct thread for this, but just wanted to inform you that in the Corona forums, they've told me that is possible to implement the new features of Spine in the runtime, as they have recently added something called Graphics 2.0. I'm waiting for a confirmation, though.
I guess I shoud make a thread about this issue to find out if this is possible and if someone could do it.