Esoteric Software

blinz117 · May 9, 2015

Hey Everybody!

I just released an Android game to the Google Play store, and it contains character animations made with Spine!

Tap Band is a pretty simple game that is similar to games like Cookie Clicker or Bitcoin Billionaire (if you've ever played/heard of those). Basically, you just tap to get more money. You can also get upgrades in the form of band members to earn money for you.

All of the character animations were done using Spine. It allowed me to quickly make the animations of the characters playing their instruments. The Unity-Spine runtime was also great for quickly getting my characters set up and animated in-game. It even allowed me to use physics to animate some of the clothing on one of the characters (Thanks, Mitch!)

The animations themselves are pretty basic as this project was mostly teach myself game development and 2D animation, but I hope to make some more cool stuff in the future!

Anyway, if you want to check it out, here is the link to download on the Google Play store. It is completely free with no in-app purchases. There are ads, but they are completely optional (but you get rewarded in-game for watching them).

blinz117 · Mar 13, 2015

Yep, that is likely your problem. The line that is having that error is the first line below (based on the Git repo: https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spi ... ilities.cs). That means the "UpdateMechanimClips" method is never getting called.

if (lastHash != skeletonDataAsset.GetSkeletonData(true).Hash) {
    //do any upkeep on synchronized assets
    UpdateMecanimClips(skeletonDataAsset);
 }

One thing that you can try is to change "true" in that line to "false". That parameter specifies if the GetSkeletonData function spits out debugging info. If you set it to false, you can see the debug info and maybe get a better idea of what is going on.

blinz117 · Mar 12, 2015

The basic idea behind baking objects is that it converts them to native Unity objects. This means after baking, your objects no longer rely on the Spine runtime to function (I believe the video references this).

Being fairly new to Unity and Spine myself, I'm certainly no expert, but I would probably say not to bake your objects unless you really have a reason to do so. There are some cool elements to the Spine runtime (check out the features on this page: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3318 ... Thanks, Mitch!) that you lose out on when baking. (I'm sure some more experienced Spine/Unity users may disagree with me on this )

As far as getting things to work the way I was suggesting, I just tested and confirmed that the animation controller does update correctly. Here are the steps that I used (note that I am using Windows and Unity 5, although I'm pretty sure this worked the same in 4.6):

1) Export your animation from Spine and import into Unity (I usually just do this by dragging the files from Windows Explorer into the project window in Unity).
2) Right click on the SkeletonData.asset file that was generated, and click Spine>Instantiate (Mecanim). The object is added to the scene. Note, also, that an animation controller is added to your project that contains your animations. This animator is also automatically associated with the object in the scene.
3) Make a new animation in Spine and re-export
4) THIS STEP IS IMPORTANT: Open your Unity project folder in Window explorer (right click on any of the Spine data in the project window and select "Show in Explorer"), and in another Explorer window open the location where you exported your Spine data. Copy the atlas, png, and json files FROM the Spine export folder TO the Unity asset folder where your old Spine data exists. This will probably ask if you want to overwrite the files, and say yes for all files. (As a side note, I tried dragging the data directly into Unity, but this simply created a new copy and did not update the data that was already there)

At this point, when you go back to Unity, the data will be refreshed, and the animator controller that was already there should be updated with the new data (including your new animation). Additionally, the state machine (the animations and transitions) should be preserved, and you can simply drag and drop your new animations.

Hopefully that made some amount of sense. Let me know if this process works for you. If not, I'd consider making a video tutorial if that would be useful to you.

Good luck!

blinz117 · Mar 12, 2015

Is there a reason you need to bake your Spine objects? If you need/want to use Mecanim, I know that if you use the Mecanim integration built into the runtime, then it works like I described (animation updates/additions show up in the same controller and can be dragged into the animator window). All you have to do is instantiate a Mecanim instance rather than a SkeletonAnimation instance at the start. I realize you would still probably have to redo your state machine if you did this, but at least it would be more robust if you needed to add animations later on.

blinz117 · Mar 12, 2015

Hi Jamie,

I'm not sure how things work with baked objects, but with the built-in integration with Mecanim, you can simply drag the animations from the project view into the animator window (where all of your existing states/transitions live). I'm not sure if it that is exactly the answer you are looking for, but I think the Mecanim Animator system is generally set up for drag and drop creation of states.

Hope that helps.

blinz117