I'm talking about running custom scripts inside the actual Spine editor, similar to how you can script Photoshop/Flash Pro/Illustrator with JavaScript. I have noticed that Spine comes bundled with Illustrator and Photoshop Export scripts.
Amount of time such scripts saves, depends a lot on a number of animations and assets you have in a project, and in our company for some games we have dozens of animations with hundreds of different swappable clothing/weapons/mounts. We have technical artists in the company who can spends couple of hours or even a day to write a script, instead of spending a week on some tedious repetitive task.
For example, scripts can be for:
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Custom exports - ability to script ourselves what exactly and in which format should be exported. For certain assets we have a custom baking system, which for example would bake current clothings of an avatar in a single atlas, but that means we only need to export animation and image offsets separately. Sometimes we can even batch creation of item icon by writing a custom exporter that would only export a single asset from whole animation. Sometimes all we need to export is names of slots in CSV.
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Batch export - It also very important to run such custom scripts on multiple files. Maybe be able to access current folder from script, or specify a script in a command line?
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Write batch modifications - Say we decided that all female animations in game should be speed up by 20%. Write a small script, and save dozens of man hours.
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Error checking - the more assets you have the harder it is to keep track if everything is developed the way the game will support it, especially when you have an non-veteran animator on a team, who is not familiar with all the limitations. A developer or technical artist can write a script that would go through project file and will make sure it would work in the game.
A lot of time all those scripts could be re-used some other time in the future, but even the ones that only used once, could save a lot of time and effort for particularly large and tedious tasks.
We don't really mind what language you guys going to use, be it Python, JS or Lua. It's also would be really nice to write your own panels or organise scripts like xJSFL does (http://www.xjsfl.com/feature/snippets-panel), but we can live without that. All we really need, is the ability to script and I'm sure we aren't alone in this.
