Spine: 2D skeletal animation

Engines, Libraries and Tools Tools Discussion
#81

Well, I’m homeless, unemployed, and have exhausted my supply of friend’s couches that I can crash on in LA, so I’m moving the operation to Europe. :smiley: I suppose it’s also good to be with friends for the holidays. :wink: I spent last Xmas at Mario’s in Austria too. In January I’ll visit Shiu in Denmark for a while. After that, I don’t know. Hopefully I can make some money with my software by then, funds are getting low!

2.5 years ago I began this nomad lifestyle, in stark contrast to my previous life – 13 years of mindless corporate zombification, going to work each day, then going home so I could do it again the next day. I like this much better, it’s a lot more interesting. I have nothing to show for the 13 years anyway, lost in the housing market thievery.

#82

Damn man, I don’t know how you can live like this! :o

Hopefully things go over well in the future! :slight_smile:

#83

i’ll put him in our cellar and will only feed him cookies.

#84

That’s a courageous choice. I see a bit what you mean about corporate zombification, I always end up by finding my job very boring, I feel forced to work, I have to pay the bills.

#85

That’s sweet! I also love the backpacking lifestyle. Well that’s lucky that you can avoid corporate completely. Most people here seem to have to do full time corporate or at least project work which is a good compromise.
I had great fun visiting jgo people on my last trip overseas (deltor, shannon and eli, thanks guys). deltor was in vienna austria, that was a beautiful city. Great place to be for christmas

#86

Please watch this video:

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Connecting flight was cancelled and I got stuck in London, which was cool because I got to visit some friends there (and eat Nando’s!). To Austria on Tuesday! :slight_smile: Have found a little time to work on Spine. I added some export features:

Eg, here is the Spine Boy run animation as a GIF at 15 fps:

Normally you’d want to export JSON or binary and use the runtime library to draw, as that saves lots of disk space and memory over using sprites. Exporting a single frame can be useful to use as a template when you need to draw a new body part to swap an image to change the perspective. Not sure if exporting spritesheets or video might be useful, but it’s neat! :slight_smile:

#87

Well the only thing you absolutely need money for is food, otherwise it wouldn’t be that challenging to do what you want to do.

#88

Yeah, food and shelter are the biggest costs. I don’t have many friends, but I’ve been lucky that the few I have let me crash, else my wandering would be quite a lot shorter. I think the key is to focus on what you really want to do. I think it is very rare this is going to be to work to make money so you can go to work more. I think a lot of people let their passions fall to the side so they can stress about their job, feel guilty, overwork themselves, etc. Having a job is often (almost always) necessary, but making it the most important thing in your life is rarely a good way to live. It’s easy to do since the money gained enables eating, shelter, heat, a car, etc, even vacations, but meanwhile… are you really happy with how you are spending your life? If not, you owe it to yourself to shake things up. :slight_smile: You only have until you die! This is a lot shorter than it may seem. :wink:

#89

Well good thing for me, what I want to do in my life is a programming job, so my life shouldn’t be that crappy :persecutioncomplex:

#90

I love programming and can do it 14+ hours/day, but doing it for a job is different than doing it for fun. A job involves all sorts of stress and the work isn’t what you would be doing for fun. It isn’t the same at all. Overworking for a job isn’t worth it. First, management is going to pat you on the head and tell you that you’re doing a great job, whether you are killing yourself at it or just putting in normal hours. You won’t get paid more and any meager recognition you might get for going the extra mile is not worth it. But the real reason to not overwork yourself is because you will get burnt out eventually and you’ll begin to hate the work. Yes, even programming. They call it work/life balance because work != life. If it was all fun and sunshine and flowers they wouldn’t call it work and you wouldn’t be getting paid to do it.

#91

Finished all the export options, AVI and QuickTime work. Added some lines connecting keys, so you can easily see if they are linear, bezier, or stepped. If two adjacent keys have the same value they will show up like stepped (no connecting line).

#92

Updated links in first post to version 0.85beta. This fixes a couple crashes, adds some new zooming buttons, export dialog (though actual export is still disabled in the beta, sorry), dopesheet key lines, Mac uses command instead of ctrl for a modifier key, auto scroll when dragging outside of dopesheet/tree, and other relatively minor stuff. The app should be quite stable now. I appreciate you guys trying it out! You’re the breast. :slight_smile:

#93

I just saw this nate… WOW! I can’t wait to try it out! :slight_smile:

-Pickle

#94

Just a quick note Nate, when a drag is initiated, stop the interpolation of the camera zoom/movement (if in there is time left to process). Scrolling fast or flinging the camera and then initiating a drag before the interpolation is over causes an unpleasant jump, breaking the otherwise silky smooth feeling of the controls 8)

Sorry, I suffer of a serious case of hopeless perfectionism ::slight_smile:

#95

I will try this out once I finish refactoring my code. :slight_smile:

#96

Thanks voidburn, I implemented stopping the zoom when a pan occurs. :slight_smile: I probably didn’t notice this since I use a trackball. It has a scroll wheel but is still harder to scroll and then quickly pan than with a mouse.

I ended up refactoring a bunch of stuff today, but things are quite a bit tidier. Hope I didn’t break anything!

#97

I played around with this tool for a while. It’s very smooth, professional-looking. It definitely appears to be something I could use to help me make 2D art for small games, and would pay for (at least, if there would be an indie license not costing hundreds of bucks).

#98

Famous last words! ;D

#99

Probably no surprise, but I went on a refactoring spree. I had to break the project file format, so unfortunately you’ll have to redo your project in the next version. I will avoid doing this in the future but these changes were big.

The biggest new feature is support for multiple skins. This allows you to reuse a skeleton and all animations with different images. This includes support for changing images in animations and the correct images will be used from the skin. I swear this is the last big feature before release. It’s just that this feature had no workaround and would not have been easy to implement later.

#100

Updated the first post with version 0.86. You will have to recreate your projects, sorry. We won’t break your project files in future releases. This has all the fancy refactoring, the new skin stuff, and lots of minor polish. You can see the export features but can’t perform an export as this is still a trial version.

I spent a lot of time on the libgdx runtime since it will be ported to other game libraries. After a number of iterations it has turned out pretty slick.

We are working on a simple kickstarter video and hope to have it up soon. Once that happens we will offer the full version to our kickstarter backers, which means you’ll have export and the libgdx runtime available and can use Spine in your games.