Spine Integration

ezsilman

Hi all. My team has been using Spine to do character animations and I've been trying to integrate it into Adventure Creator in a seamless way.

I thought this could be a good thread for anyone wanting to do the same thing to find out a way or different ways to achieve this... with the hope of even possibly having an official integration with AC in a release.

I've so far created a custom animation engine to call out to a custom character controller script on the Player. That custom controller script detects walk, idle, and other animation states and changes the SkeletonAnimation on the child object to the relevant animation (with time scale, loop etc.)

One of the problems I've had is that the transition from Walk to Idle states/animations when the player stops walking happens just a bit too late. Basically, I'd like the character to transition to idle JUST before he stops.

Otherwise, I think Spine is a fantastic program and there are major advantages in reduced file size, as opposed to separate sprite images for each animation frame. Hope we can find an excellent solution for anyone wanting to integrate it.

ciaps

Hi @ezsilman, here you can find the controllers I wrote and I am using for my Spine chars in Adventure Creator: 

http://esotericsoftware.com/forum/Problem-with-mixing-animations-5272

http://esotericsoftware.com/forum/Mirrored-animation-bones-issue-5281

I would really welcome an official integration of Spine from @ChrisIceBox, we are a growing number of users using Spine with AC and it totally makes sense. I wasted a few months as amateur project just for get it running, and I would have liked indeed to have things working out of the box.

If you would like to share your progresses as well, please let me know! I always welcome reading fellow people's approaches!

ChrisIceBox

@ciaps: The goal with AC going forward is to empower users to more easily add their own integration, rather than depend on myself to keep up to date with changes that all such 3rd party assets make.  Have you written a custom animation engine as per Section 12.5 of the Manual?  I'm sure it would go down well on the Extending the Editor pages.

Snebjorn

@ChrisIceBox: sounds to me like the perfect approach. Keep AC's APIs clean and be open to integration with other assets. I know I'm using a few where I've had to do some custom scripting - does the idea of a new forum category called "3rd part assets" sound completely stupid???

ChrisIceBox

@Snebjoyn: Thank you for the approval.  That's really what the Extending the Editor pages are for, IMO.

v1.50 will go some way towards "streamlining" AC's API, so that the currently-supported assets like UFPS and Ouya are handled in add-on scripts, that AC itself doesn't "see" - meaning it'll be far easier to custom-tailor them to suit your needs.

Snebjorn

@ChrisIceBox: I always thought "Extending the editor" was just for scripts extensions for the AC editor - prepare for a tsunami of 3rd party integration stuff!!!  <:-P

ezsilman

@ChrisIceBox: Makes sense I've created a new discussion on the Extending the Editor category.

http://www.adventurecreator.org/forum/discussion/4332/spine-integration