I would almost kill to see a working version of the spine runtime in SDL!
It was one of the first Game programming Libraries I played with when I first started out!
I also helped port Spine into D/DSFML and it was a blast to work on, So I know how cool/hard this is!
Good luck man!

I was able to read everything in the Spine binary file until I got to Meshes... I read how many points are in the array but it feeds me just 1! So it reads only one part of a point(X) and fails to read the rest of the File.

Well I learned a lot about how Binary files work but I think I will stop working on this until Spine becomes a little more ripe.

I also made the Bone Component, Its been sitting on the Github pull request list for Spine.

Day Late for this,
Well Spines is far superior than what ever Unity2D will give you. But like what Nate said, Its workflow and how well the tool helps you. This is going to have to be something you have to figure out. If you used spine before it won't feel any different over in unity, You can still do everything from Loading an animation, to playing one. Spine does however become more easier to use in unity because of the Heiarchy system, The Umbra Occlusion system and some fancy mono/C# serialization via scripts. Unity2D can also help compress your Spine Texture! Very nice feature.

But Unity2D uses there own animation system that is a little to not very nice at all, There node graph system would be somewhat helpful in a 3D game but in 2D, Not so. They also kind of expect you to use Sprite Sheets.... For everything. Unity2D Dev Team Ya, Lets assume the entire market is still somewhere in the limbo of the 80's and 90's.... Though I would be a little hypocritical considering I'm working on a game that has pixel art however I do use spine for making the animations(No SpriteSheet!)

If you have any specific questions(about Unity), you can PM or Email me(<removed>).

You probably want to store the bone name in the BoneComponent and then look up the bone as needed, caching if possible. You'll have to handle if the skeleton is recreated, which is probably why you lose your selection when you press play.

Your probably right on that bit. I will make the Bone Component more like that and remove the modified SkeletonAnimationComponent. Because that would cut down on the confusion. Anyway we can document the instructions so the user knows how to use it? Or make one? Leave a little commented instruction inside the bone component? Maybe add a bone component on the example scene? Both?

I will try to make it really hard to mess this up on the user side of things.

TBH, probably the only thing I'd merge, at least at first, is a BoneComponent that is created manually, has a way to choose a SkeletonComponent and a bone, and updates its transform to match the bone. This is the simplest thing possible and we can build on the complexity from there.

Thats what it is right now... I will a make the slight modifications mentioned above and pass it over on github!

Woah thats big!
You might need to find the best compression mode and turn on mipmap.
On the image inspector you will see Texture Type... Find Advanced!
There you can turn on MipMaps and test the different compression formats and play with extra features!

I like, "RGBA + 1-Bit Alpha Compressed ETC2 4 bits"... They are perfect for spines texture packing images because there is only 1 bit of space for the alpha channel.... Compressing out the majority of the image size(Which very well might be alpha). Big note here... Some Platforms(Mobile anything)... Don't have support for certain image compressions.... As that seems like the popular platform, A word of warning is needed.

You can read more on it in the unity manual!

Another option would be to re-export your images in your favorite photo editor with one of these formats. PSD, TIFF, JPG, TGA, PNG, GIF, BMP, IFF, PICT(Copy-Pasta'd shamelessly from the manual)

Hope that helps!

Image!

Hey guys,
Just dropping in for a progress update... Kinda proof really.
I made a tool to make bone components and I settled on something that pretty much doesn't take much memory and is fine for efficiency. If you have a game object with the same name as a bone... It uses it... As long as it has a bone component... Cuts down on clutter too! I did this because there is a really annoying glitch were when you hit play it looses what bone it was attached to(something tells me thats supposed to happen). I guess a new skeleton is made on play or I can't retain values on execution, either way. This works out and does as advertised. Now I need to work on manipulation... Unless you guys are fine with not being able to mess with the "Transforms" and letting the skeleton manipulating it?

Also if you want a bone component destroyed... Destroy the game object its attached to.
The bone component doesn't touch the skeleton and the skeleton doesn't keep track of it except on launch were it attaches a bone to the Bone Component.

Let me know what you guys think... I still have some work to do on it.(Physics,Sub Meshes Manipulation and optimizations)

//LittlePinWheel

What about other bones that are children of that bone

Might do a hierarchy and check if a bone is parented then make components for those too and let unity manage the transforms and the offsets.

Also, does all this require using Skinned Mesh Renderers in order to work, as this will break dynamic batching between multiple skeletons using the same atlas, which may be a consideration for some people who have managed to batch multiple enemies, etc on screen, by not using multiple materials. If so could there be a system to batch multiple skinned meshes that share the same material and still preserve all of their individual functionality/animations? I'm just wondering how you reference to the mesh vertices you wanted to alter or if you assigned bones with weights in order to do the movement.

I'm not changing anything on the rendering system yet... When I will, I will be moving the Sub mesh's for bones components to manipulate.... Which I'm still working on. And if you are wondering how I will reference the points or do weights... Still working on that. But the bone has a matrix and the base skeleton component has some code I might find useful to get what I need for the manipulation.
I'm going to have to play with it.

If that doesn't work I'm going to "Steal" the submesh and make it a mesh on the Bone Component's game object and rewrite the SkeletonComponent.... But thats last resort... As I imagine is inefficient(More draw calls) and like diving into a hornets nest.... Also many toes will be stepped on if I submit it to Github.

//Nate

Task:
https://trello.com/c/RWIT6WQd/59-boneco ... spine-tk2d

Kinda flattered that my forum post made it on the development trello board.

Wait, I forgot I implement my own string format which optimizes for ASCII. No wonder BinaryReader couldn't read it! Sorry. You'll need to implement the readInt and readString methods

You know I looked at the Libgdx docs... But it never really accord to me that it could be the main reason I couldn't get it to work. Thanks man.

For performance I could attach points to the bone object.

Mesh points... Because I want like one draw call from the skeleton component.
So when you adjust the bone(With animation off)... You may move, rotate and scale without spine overriding it. And the bone object will set the (mesh)points according to its location, rotate & scale.

Sorry for the confusion there.... I have a slight issue getting the words across on a equal meaning.

perhaps through a drop down list of the bones in a skeleton shown

I can work on that... Shouldn't be too hard.

Anyway, looking forward to this, I think it could be really flexible and super useful! Thanks CoryGold for all your efforts

No problem, I'm making it for my future/current games so I kinda need it. You guys really helped me out with this feedback. I will pop it over to github as soon as I apply this feedback.

Quick note here... I thought of a way I can handle 2D collision boxes... If you have a 2D poly collider and you have a bone component under the same object, if the check box for Bounding boxes to poly2D is on, It will set the points to the poly collider.

//Nate

Can't you use BinaryReader in C#? It looks like it is the C# equivalent of Java's DataInputStream, which is what spine-libgdx's SkeletonBinary uses.

Well I did use C# BinaryReader in the beggining but it has some issues because the way Java handles UTF-8 Strings & Primitives, On that documentation it shows whats different. I'm still going to figure this out even if it will just be changed when you add meshes. I'm personally curios and I really want to figure this out for the sake of added knowledge I might receive from figuring it out.

I haven't written documentation for the binary format or SkeletonBinary for all the runtimes yet because the format is not yet stable (needs meshes, FFD, skinning) and also JSON is pretty ok most of the time.

Then could you think about Bson?, Works kinda like json except it exports in a Binary format and is traversable from different platforms.... MongoDB & Jackson have a function(s) to convert Json to Bson.... Except MongoDB & Jackson are very large. So I would use a smaller implementation or make a function on the Json reader to except a Bson File and just convert it there... Where ever there is(C#,C++,Java,etc).

A GameObject per attachment has advantages (eg attaching colliders), but I expect it will perform worse than spine-unity. Also it may be tricky to have attachments hidden and shown. As for it being in the official runtime, I'm not sure. I guess it depends on its complexity. No promises, but if it has all the features needed, is not a lot of code, and you would like to contribute it then I may take on the responsibility of maintaining it in the official runtime. If not we can still link if from the 3rd party section of the runtimes page.

I actually wrote a piggy-back class/Component for Spine.Bone and it is used by a special SkeletonComponent so people can choose not to use it.... Its still drawn under one mesh Comp(The base SkeletonComponent) though... For performance I could attach points to the bone object. When the new skeleton Component runs it will create bone Components and a Gameobject for each bone and attach the bone to the Component. The bone Component then updates itself to the spot where the bone is. I'm going to write facilities to change the scale,Position and even rotation via the bone Component eventually(Half implemented)... Working out how to do the rest might be a confusing effort. Maybe move the mesh points for the bone? and not the bone itself... So the user can flop from animated to not animated via bone comp.

//ProudLittlePinwheel

Mainly, I believe you should not destroy GameObjects that have been created by the system to match bones.

Solved that bit... Made a button and it will make a BoneComp for each bone, If an existing bone is changed via the animation file, the bones with same names are modified(but not replaced) and new bones comps are made/added if different.

Also, for attaching colliders take a look at the Physics integration I started just in case it may be of some help to you. It takes care of creating/updating Bounding box colliders and disabling/enabling on required frames.

Shouldn't be too hard... Might make a spine poly collider, and spine joint so users can make pretty nasty contraptions.

Hey Guys,I'm new to this forum and/but I want a little help and I wanted hear some opinions on something from the community. I'm working on 2 things, One is a binary reader to read the binary files spine can export, I mostly wanted to talk about that. Then I also want to hear opinions to find if anyone is interested in what I'm working on for unity.

Which is basically a skeletle animation support that has each limb or bone a GameObject in unity, Kinda like how if you imported a 3D model with separate parts in it. Its usefulness is very helpful because you can attach skeletons to a bone or scripts or attach hotboxes to each limb! I was wondering if you guys would be okay with that in the regular unity runtime? I'm already done with it and I just have a little cleanup to do to feel comfortable sharing it.

Now the C# binary reader... I want to make it available to everyone because the file size will drastically reduce a games overall size and that it is faster to read/load. I was able to decipher java's decrepit encoding system they call MUTF-8, only halfway.... I can read String, Integers, regular bytes, and some bools.... But no floats, So I need help with that.

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Resources;

namespace SpineBinary
{

public class SkeletonJson
{
	public SkeletonJson(string Location)
	{
		FileStream SourceStream = File.Open (Location, FileMode.Open);
		MiscUtil.IO.EndianBinaryReader reader = new MiscUtil.IO.EndianBinaryReader (MiscUtil.Conversion.EndianBitConverter.Big,SourceStream);
		Console.WriteLine("Bones Amount:"+(reader.Read ()-1));
		Console.Write ("Bone Name:" + (reader.ReadString ()));
		Console.Write (" ParentIndex:"+(reader.ReadInt32()));
		Console.Write (" X:"+(reader.ReadSingle() * 1));//Scale is 1 by default
		Console.Write (" Y:"+(reader.ReadSingle() * 1));//Scale is 1 by default
		Console.Write (" W:"+(reader.ReadSingle()));
		Console.Write (" H:"+(reader.ReadSingle()));
		Console.ReadLine ();
	}
}

public class MainClass
{
	
	public static void Main (string[] args)
	{
		SkeletonJson Test = new SkeletonJson ("skeleton.skel");
	}
}
}

What it feeds out:

Bones Amount:3
Bone Name:root ParentIndex:0 X:0 Y:1 W:1 H:0

Some data is being misplaced here or the reader is reading off all of x as one value and letting Y take W's value(BAD!).

Its supposed to be:

Bones Amount:3
Bone Name:root ParentIndex:0 X:0 Y:0 W:1 H:1

This is just a snippet and you guys need John Skeets MiscUtils Library(just the EndianBinaryReader and maybe his streamer). My plan was to adapt his progress and see if I can make it be a java binary file reader(as in it reads java binary files not it being a java binary reader... its not) for Spine's really nice C# runtime.

But if the spine developers(Nate) could actually export spines binary files in something like BSON or UTF-8 or ASCII... Something that isn't Java's home-made contraption. This would be a none issue and we might get somewhere sooner with this.

Some feed back will be a great help to the spine runtime. So you guys could perhaps get Binary Files read on C# and maybe other languages.