Just updated to the latest version and saw, that skeletal animation through Spine is now supported. Great, love to have the option for skeletal animation!
But what about other programs like OpenToonz? Spine costs a LOT of money, the essential version for 99 (reduced price just now 69) USD only has very limited functionality. Paying more than 300 bucks to get the functions that OpenToonz offers for free doesn’t sound too well.
I guess Gdevelop is making money through this, but it shouldn’t be the only option possible for skeletal animation. especially for a game engine that suffers from low frame rates as soon as bigger, more detailed graphics are involved.
1 Like
I’m happy too there’s some kind of skeletal animation implementation… but it’s also a mistery to me why they decided to implement the very expensive Spine instead of —for example— Dragonbones (an opensource and absolutely free tool for skeletal animation that already have implementations for Unity, Cocos2D and other engines).
Anyways, I’m sure a lot of users of Gdeveleop wil get Spine in one way or another
2 Likes
The company behind dragonbones went bankrupt and it is no longer updated or available through official sources. But fyi, dragonbones had spine format export support.
Spine was not implemented by the GDevelop team but contributed by an external person, the GDevelop team had nothing to do with deciding what to build. If they were to decide to add support for other tools, it would take a lot of time, so it isn’t reasonable to expect they would’ve added support for another tool before releasing spine support.
And considering there is now already spine support, which wasn’t a primary focus of the GDevelop team in the first place, the return on investment of adding support for an alternative, less popular equivalent tool is looking grim, I wouldn’t bet on it getting added if it is not contributed by a motivated community member.
2 Likes
I would like to see support for kestrelmoon Creature Animation software. In my opinion superior than Spine, and way cheaper.
1 Like
You can export animation data out to a file that can be read in by various Game Engines via tha provided runtimes. A variety of Game Engines are supported: Unity, Cocos2dX, libGDX, MonoGame, ThreeJS, BabylonJS and PixiJS . In addition to that, you can use parts of the runtime code written in their base languages(C++, C#, Java, Javascript ) and adapt it to your own custom engine(s).
Some very good info on the runtimes, some clever person may make it happen
1 Like