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  • Large Asset count.. Skins vs Attachments?

    anglais

Good Morning, evening , afternoon,

I've been doing a lot of research before the journey of setting up a project. A little background information. Our game has a large asset database of Head Armor, Body Armor, Boots, Gloves, Shoulder Pads, Belts, Weapons, Shields, etc... Most of my findings have been either the use of Attachments or the Mix-and-Match system, but I have not found anything talking about performance vs the two and which one has a better workflow.

Would the mix-and-match system be more for the armor type items, and attachments is for the weapons and shields?

If anyone could steer me in the right direction that would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

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Hello,

I often see people use a mixed approach: any object that requires a skin or special constraint to work gets added in Spine. Any object that just requires the sprite to be swapped at runtime gets done that way. Not so much for performance in game (regardless of approach, only the active skin elements are calculated at runtime, and if those are the pieces, those will have to be added and shown), but rather because swapping at runtime just the recolors means they don't have to be manually set in Spine, especially if there's tons of them, turning into a significant time saver for the rigger.

For example we may rig one skin with a certain shape and mesh for a hat, and swap all the different colors for the same shape of hat at runtime.
Or we may set a certain combination of IKs to hold a gun correctly, but then swap the gun for any gun that is held the same way at runtime.

I hope this helps! (Also I'm an artist, so I'm sure someone may go more in depth performance-wise 😃 )
Metrics view - Spine User Guide I'll leave this page that discusses performance in general.

Thank you for the response Erika. By the way, I love your tutorials! So I just created a quick concept of how I would structure the system. Would this be the best approach? There would be hundreds of different items in each folder.

Thanks in advance!

The structure makes sense to me! Are the two axes and swords so different they require different folders? if yes, great, if not, you can probably just do one axe and replace the other at runtime.

As an aside, I find it very useful to check the metrics view with several skins pinned to check if everything looks good (especially because the metrics view will show stats for the combined skins!)
Skins view - Spine User Guide

I'm glad you find the tutorials useful 😃 thank you for letting me know, it makes me super happy!

Sorry for the late response, and thank you for the response. Yes I will have axes that require two hands to hold, and axes that only require one. This goes for swords, and maces as well.