Granular control over Spine animation during runtime

MerciLeslie

Hi Spine experts 🙂

I am new to using Spine and I come from Flash/ActionScript 3.0 background. I am wondering if it is possible to have a granular control over the animation during runtime using Spine Unity-c# runtime similar to Flash.

For example, I have 1 Spine animation of, lets say, 100 frames. I would like to start the animation in a paused state(frame #1) and at a later time play the first 25 frames at a normal speed and stop on frame #26. Again, at a later time play the next 25 frames and stop on frame #51.

This would be easy to do in Flash. I searched the forum, available documentation and could not find a way to achieve this using Spine. The lack of proper documentation for the runtime does not make this any easier. My question is, is this even possible to do and, if yes, how would one go about doing this and if not, is there any other way to achieve the same result?

Thanks for your time!

MerciLeslie

BinaryCats

ugh! I wrote I really good reply then the forum lost it when I pressed submit! 🙁

abridged:

you can get the current animation, which is called a trackentry this has two varibles you will need. .time which is how long into the animation it is (i.e. frame/30, spine runs at 30fps) and .timescale set this to 0 and your animation will pause

what language are you using?

MerciLeslie

Thanks for the reply, BinaryCats. I am using C# in Unity. Looks like trackentry is a ActionScript class.

BinaryCats

ah I see you said in your op. 🙂

you need something a little like this:

(we may or may not have a strange implementation of spine - I didn't do it :/ - , but if you look up playing animations unity in forum search, a better example might be found 🙂 )


Spine.TrackEntry myanimation 
void foo()
{
myanimation = SetAnimation(track, Name, looping);//Play your animation and store it
myanimation.TimeScale(0.0f);
}

void StartAnimation()
{
myanimation.TimeScale(1.0f);
}
void StopAnimation()
{
myanimation.TimeScale(0.0f);
}

worth noting, its usally not best to store libraries types (mostly encase they change) what we do is have our own class struct which would store similar information to trackentry

Pharan

@[deleted]
TrackEntry is a C# class. You can find it in AnimationState.cs since it's part of that system.

MerciLeslie

Thanks for the reply guys. I wrote a simple class to test out the suggestion you guys made:

public class ProgressbarController : MonoBehaviour {
   private SkeletonAnimation mySkAnimation;
   private SkeletonData mySkData;
   private Spine.Animation myAnimation;
   private Spine.TrackEntry myTrackEntry;

   private float value1;
   private int count1;

   void Start () {
      mySkAnimation = GetComponent<SkeletonAnimation>();
      mySkData = mySkAnimation.Skeleton.Data;
      myAnimation = mySkData.FindAnimation("animation");
      myTrackEntry = mySkAnimation.state.SetAnimation(0, "animation", false);
      myTrackEntry.TimeScale = 0.0f;

  value1 = 0.0f;
  count1 = 1;
   }

   void Update () {
      if(++count1 % 200 == 0){
         count1 = 0;
         value1 += 4.0f;
         MoveBarTo(value1);
      }
   }

   public void MoveBarTo(float perc) {
      float endTime = myAnimation.Duration * perc * 0.01f;
      Debug.Log("MoveBarToPercentage: "+perc+", endTime: "+endTime);   // Shows correct percentage and endTime values

  myTrackEntry.TimeScale = 1.0f;
  myTrackEntry.EndTime = endTime;      // Animation does not move past the visual representation of the value first time I set it, which was 4%
   }
}

When I set the TrackEntry.EndTime in Start() it works as intended but when I use as shown above it does not work, to be specific, it works only the first time I call MoveBarTo() and does not work on subsequent calls. Am I doing something wrong here? Sorry to keep bothering you.

BinaryCats

Its not the end time you are calculating there, it is the current time in the animation. You want to set myTrackEntry.time and (depednign on intended behaviour) myTrackEntry.lasttime

MerciLeslie

myTrackEntry.Time = x starts playing the animation from 'x' to the end whereas I have no idea what myTrackEntry.LastTime does or at least it's not very apparent. I am looking for a way to play the animation from frame #0 through frame #x. I was somewhat able to get it working the way I need by checking the myTrackEntry.Time property in Update () on every frame and setting myTrackEntry.TimeScale = 1.0fto let the animation progress or myTrackEntry.TimeScale = 0.0f when I want it to pause. It's not very precise because the myTrackEntry.Time property is rarely going to be equal to the value I'd calculate. This poses an issue which is, if I have an animation of say, 100 frames then there is no guaranteed way to stop it at, say, frame #63, is there? The animation is going to stop somewhere between, let's say, frame #58 - frame #68.

BinaryCats

lasttime us used for events (and any maybe attachments).

Sorry I kinda assumed you changed your flow for this. and wanted to set the animation everyframe. We do this for loading bars and it works well.

you have to remember that spine doesn't work in frames to- it works in time, frames are just nicer numbers to work with. if you apsolutly need it to stop frame perfect, for what ever reason. When you update your skeleton, instead of passing in delta time, you could pass in a set value(0.0333).

This is what we use for bars loading and unloading:

float CurrentFrame = mesh->GetFrameCurrentAnim(track);
int32_t dur = mesh->GetNumFramesCurrentAnim(track);

float frameToSetTo = ratio * dur;
const char * animToPlay = LoadAnimname;

if (CurrentFrame > -1 && CurrentFrame > frameToSetTo)
{
   animToPlay = UnLoadanimname;
   frameToSetTo = (1-ratio) * dur; // inverse the ratio
}

if (Str.Cmp(mesh->GetCurrentAnim(track),animToPlay)!=0)
{
   mesh->SetAnim(animToPlay,false,track);
}

mesh->AnimPause(track);
mesh->SetFrameCurrentAnim(frameToSetTo, track);

again this isn't letting the animation "play to a point", but as we calculate where in the animation the bar should be filled up from every frame, it doesn't really matter - for us anyway.

sorry if this isn't clear. :beer: :drunk: :puke: :puke: :puke: :puke: