Spine: an animation tool that focuses on 2D animation for games | Hacker News Reader

Spine: an animation tool that focuses on 2D animation for games

esotericsoftware.com

60 pointsjoubert22 comments

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I used Spine a while back. It's such a lovely tool with a great UI, and compatible with Linux.

It's neither free nor open source though so I don't know if this is very suitable here on HN.

In any case, I wrote an exporter for Inkscape since they only had an Illustrator plugin for vector graphics:

https://github.com/jleclanche/inkscape-spine-exporter

There's absolutely nothing in either HN's guidelines or general culture to exclude non-free software (in either sense).

The Inkscape to Spine exporter sounds very interesting. It would be great if your repo also included an example SVG and maybe a screenshot so users can get a feeling of functionality.

fwiw, Spine is made using libgdx [1], which is open source. The various stretch-goal animation runtimes are also available [2] on Github.

AFAIK the team behind both libgdx and Spine are quite good at giving back to the community. After libgdx they quit their day jobs and went full-time as Esoteric Software [3] and did an excellent job following through with Spine's two kickstarters.

I think this is very relevant to HN not only because of the guys' open source contributions but also their entrepreneurial history (success?).

[1] https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx [2] https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spine-runtimes [3] http://esotericsoftware.com/

(I'm not affiliated with ES but was a backer of Spine and am a user of libgdx)

I didn't know libgdx was from them. Fascinating!

I think Spine was started by one of the libGDX guys, Nate Sweet, and someone else (I can't find an About or Team page on their site). The other primary libGDX developer is Mario Zechner ('badlogic around here) but I don't think he's on the Esoteric team. I think he works for RoboVM now, in fact.

Our company seriously pursued using Spine for all of our in game 2D animations in small to medium sized budget projects. Unfortunately the runtime license was far to costly and restrictive to use for work for hire type client work, of which most of our work is. Really wish we could just pay a flat fee rather than cause all sorts of red tape and recurring payments for our clients. Most of the games we produce are for not for profits that can't really justify those kinds of recurring costs. Ultimately, we built our own tool that I'm sure is far more primitive but gets the job done.

Not sure I understand - are you referring to $299 Pro license or are you a 500K+ enterprise and have an issue with $2200 license?

I guess he's talking about $2200 (+259$) per user per year for the use of the program and runtimes. I'm not sure what the "use" constitutes of (especially in context of runtimes).

Yes this is correct. All of our other tools and libraries consist of us paying up front for the version we need for our release. If they release a new version, and our application needs that new version, then I am all about paying for it, but having to come back and pay every year whether we've incorporated a new version or not is very challenging for us and our clients. What if every piece of software and library we used required this? It would be an absolute nightmare.

I wonder if they have any special considerations for non profit companies

A similar animation tool that I use regularly is Flump, which exports nested Flash animations as texture atlases and XML. It is a fantastic tool if you are an ex-Flash developer looking for a fast workflow with great animation performance.

I have just released a runtime that supports canvas/webgl through PixiJS. It is currently available for Haxe developers but I will be releasing a bower package soon.

https://github.com/tconkling/flump

https://github.com/jackwlee01/pixi-flump-runtime

I backed the kickstarter for this tool back when it came out and I'm glad I did. I don't do a lot of this type of thing, but overall it's the quickest and easiest one I've used! It's been a boon for making small animations for many of the quick projects I've worked on. Keep meaning to do something real and proper with it, but I've yet to take the time.

Every time I go to use it, it's getting an update and new runtimes. No complaints at all!

Spine is really neat, and they have a lot of features that enable you to make cool animations really quickly.

I remember some of the rendering functionality stressed the Xbox 360's garbage collector back with the XNA version. I'd be curious to hear if people have used it with MonoGame on mobile devices.

Works pretty well with in the browser with A-Frame too: http://joshgalvin.github.io/post/project/aframe-spine/

We considered Spine. It was easy to use and enjoyable to work with. For 2D, we ended up with Maya LT exporting to Unity, not only was Maya more versatile as a 3D engine, I believe it ended up being more cost effective.

I'd be interested to hear more about your experience using Maya LT for a 2D art flow to Unity. Does your art start in Maya or are you importing from another application?

The artists used, I believe Photoshop, to create their textures, and Illustrator for cleanup.

In Maya, textures were dropped onto planes, rigged, animated and exported via fbx (the pipeline was very similar to how we would have done it with Spine, with Spine exporting to JSON + Unity Runtime, while we imported the fbx directly into Unity).

Thanks a lot for the info. Any games that used this pipeline that you can share?

Anyone have experience using this with Unity? What's the workflow like? Does it use much memory? How does it effect the framerate?

Where is the button to play the animation in the trial version?

If you click "Setup" in the top left it will switch to animation mode and you can play from there.

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