ddd Sent them back to engineer who only have 3.8 and got errors as first 2 phot shows.
Yep, this can't work. The editor version used to export must match the runtime version, eg 3.8 and 3.8, or 4.2 and 4.2.
ddd They asked us to export in 3.8 on our end we got the error as it shown on 3rd photo.
The third photo doesn't show an error, it shows warnings. The export succeeded. You can import the 3.8 JSON into the 3.8 editor, make sure the animations work correctly, then export 3.8 data to give your developers.
ddd How can we make it work without loosing anything that we created?
Using 4.2 to export to an older version is going to lose data. For example, all your Bezier curves will change to linear. If you don't want to lose anything, your developers must update the runtime to 4.2.
ddd The engineers told us they can not update their software to 4.2 due to past and current project they have which doesn’t make sense to us.
It involves some work for the developers to upgrade to 4.2 from 3.8. If they have many skeletons that use 3.8 data, then they would need to update all those to 4.2 data by exporting them with 4.2. That isn't hard if they have all the .spine files, but for some reason many people throw away the .spine file and keep only the exported data. Then they need to import that data, save a .spine file, then re-export with 4.2, which is a little more effort. When you have hundreds of skeletons, it can be a lot of effort. We provide some scripts that can help.
Using 4.2 is muuuch better than 3.8. 3.8 was released more than 5 years ago. 4.2 has tons of features and fixes that can make it worth the upgrade.
If the developers still cannot update to 4.2, then you'll have to export 3.8 data, import it into the 3.8 editor, and then fix your animations using 3.8. I'm sorry that this creates a loss of work! It's very important to match the editor version with the runtime version. When going backward in editor versions the older version will be missing some features that are only in the new version and it's likely your project will need to be fixed up.
