some Spine questions (re it's benefits)

Spine
#1

Anyone able to give what the key advantages are for using Spine as opposed to Anime Studio Pro?  Questions I’m wondering:

 

Q1 - What advantages does Spine have over Anime Studio pro for a Corona developer? (e.g. programmatically control the animations from Corona Lua code is what I heard? export images once and have all animations based on skeleton movement configuration?

Q2 - One big question, would Spine support having different versions of character depending on what costumes/power up the character may have? i.e. in this case you just modify the animation once and then it would be effectively modified for all permutation of the animation? (e.g. base character, character with backpack, character with jetpack on back etc)

Q3 - In fact what if one of the powerups/different versions of the character have additional items like a cape which you wanted to animate. Wondering in this case whether you’d need to do different characters as one had a cape which would flow in the wind and therefore need extra bones in the skeleton to animate?

Q4 - Do you support a character auto creating a physics object in Corona? I.e. boundary has to be created by multiple polygons in Corona, and there is a limited number of sides for such polygons. This would be excellent. That is noting in Corona:

A more complex body may be constructed by specifying multiple body elements and shapes. In cases where the overall shape of the object is concave, or the shape has more than eight sides, you can use multiple body elements to construct it. See the Physics Bodies guide for more information

Q5 - Follow on question, if yes, then is it possible that the physics object boundary could correctly follow the shape as animation occurs? (I’ve noted myself some funny things in Corona in the past, maybe fixed now, if you try to modify the physics boundary already in place - I’m thinking of cases when during the animation the shape of the object changes quite a bit, to the point if can look fake sometime when it hits a wall earlier due to the “set in stone” physics object)

 

Q6 - Does spine support Corona’s Dynamic Image Selection concept? It would need to have teh capability to export different resolutions versions of the images with apporpriate file extentions in the name ( http://docs.coronalabs.com/guide/basics … amicimages )

 

Q7 - How is performance on Corona?  This depends on usage no doubt, so say assuming we were talking about a horizontal scrolling / endless running type game, using it for the main player & some objects placed on the screen?  

#2

I don’t have much experience with Anime Studio, but as far as I can tell from your questions I think Spine will fit well for what you are trying to do.

I suggest trying out the trail version on a simple character to see what you can do with it.

I’ll try to come back to your questions when I have more time available :slight_smile:

#3

don’t have all the answers but some here are some quick ones:

Q3 - In fact what if one of the powerups/different versions of the character have additional items like a cape which you wanted to animate. Wondering in this case whether you’d need to do different characters as one had a cape which would flow in the wind and therefore need extra bones in the skeleton to animate?

you can do this 2 ways, you can articulate it- make a “top of cape”, “mid cape” and “bottom cape” graphic, make them into a jointed cape that attaches to the skeleton, and animate it

you can also draw out the animations as if it were a sprite sheet, and have spine flip through those graphics as it advances the frames, like a more traditional frame-by-frame drawing approach

Q6 - Does spine support Corona’s Dynamic Image Selection concept? It would need to have teh capability to export different resolutions versions of the images with apporpriate file extentions in the name ( http://docs.coronalabs.com/guide/basics … amicimages )

yes it does, it takes some fiddling but works fine.

 

Q7 - How is performance on Corona?  This depends on usage no doubt, so say assuming we were talking about a horizontal scrolling / endless running type game, using it for the main player & some objects placed on the screen?  

should be fine. i’ve loaded up like 4-5 animations in a screen and they run fine, i bet you could go more than that easily.

#4

thanks - have purchased the $60 edition now and starting to play…after only seeing the $249 professional edition on the first pass and not realizing these was an essential edition doh

by the way - the Corona spine examples are broken at the moment, however the spine team have promised to look/update them soon (I assume due to a Corona change perhaps…)

#5

@greg, it’s not just the examples that are broken, but also parts of the runtime – I got it to work by mixing old and new versions of the runtime, see thread here: http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/45618-cant-get-spine-examples-to-work-with-current-build-20142189/

#6

_memo, which version did you use? The last january version? (and just animationState? I notice the latest Corona file still uses reference points. And the sample code for :apply() no longer seems to work?)

#7

@richard9: I use the latest version of the Corona & Lua runtimes, combined with

With this setup, everything seems to work

#8

I don’t have much experience with Anime Studio, but as far as I can tell from your questions I think Spine will fit well for what you are trying to do.

I suggest trying out the trail version on a simple character to see what you can do with it.

I’ll try to come back to your questions when I have more time available :slight_smile:

#9

don’t have all the answers but some here are some quick ones:

Q3 - In fact what if one of the powerups/different versions of the character have additional items like a cape which you wanted to animate. Wondering in this case whether you’d need to do different characters as one had a cape which would flow in the wind and therefore need extra bones in the skeleton to animate?

you can do this 2 ways, you can articulate it- make a “top of cape”, “mid cape” and “bottom cape” graphic, make them into a jointed cape that attaches to the skeleton, and animate it

you can also draw out the animations as if it were a sprite sheet, and have spine flip through those graphics as it advances the frames, like a more traditional frame-by-frame drawing approach

Q6 - Does spine support Corona’s Dynamic Image Selection concept? It would need to have teh capability to export different resolutions versions of the images with apporpriate file extentions in the name ( http://docs.coronalabs.com/guide/basics … amicimages )

yes it does, it takes some fiddling but works fine.

 

Q7 - How is performance on Corona?  This depends on usage no doubt, so say assuming we were talking about a horizontal scrolling / endless running type game, using it for the main player & some objects placed on the screen?  

should be fine. i’ve loaded up like 4-5 animations in a screen and they run fine, i bet you could go more than that easily.

#10

thanks - have purchased the $60 edition now and starting to play…after only seeing the $249 professional edition on the first pass and not realizing these was an essential edition doh

by the way - the Corona spine examples are broken at the moment, however the spine team have promised to look/update them soon (I assume due to a Corona change perhaps…)

#11

@greg, it’s not just the examples that are broken, but also parts of the runtime – I got it to work by mixing old and new versions of the runtime, see thread here: http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/45618-cant-get-spine-examples-to-work-with-current-build-20142189/

#12

_memo, which version did you use? The last january version? (and just animationState? I notice the latest Corona file still uses reference points. And the sample code for :apply() no longer seems to work?)

#13

@richard9: I use the latest version of the Corona & Lua runtimes, combined with

With this setup, everything seems to work

#14

Another question for spine :

Can we tint spine animations, like here :

http://coronalabs.com/blog/2012/10/09/dynamically-optimized-sprite-sheets/

Thx

Yes it can :slight_smile:

I found the answer ghere :

“r,g,b,a The color to tint the entire skeleton.” in esotericsoftware.com/spine-using-runtimes#Rendering

#15

If I’m not mistaken each slot also has their own rgba values which are multiplied by the skeleton rgba so it is possible to only change the color of single slots.

It is also possible to set a hue or any other filter to the images directly though the skeleton.images table.

#16

Update to this: the Spine Corona runtime now works fine for me, no need for the tricks I linked further above in the thread.

#17

Thx for the tips.

#18

Another question for spine :

Can we tint spine animations, like here :

http://coronalabs.com/blog/2012/10/09/dynamically-optimized-sprite-sheets/

Thx

Yes it can :slight_smile:

I found the answer ghere :

“r,g,b,a The color to tint the entire skeleton.” in esotericsoftware.com/spine-using-runtimes#Rendering

#19

If I’m not mistaken each slot also has their own rgba values which are multiplied by the skeleton rgba so it is possible to only change the color of single slots.

It is also possible to set a hue or any other filter to the images directly though the skeleton.images table.

#20

Update to this: the Spine Corona runtime now works fine for me, no need for the tricks I linked further above in the thread.