Great, that would be cool

@Shiu
My idea is to have the character and the object as seperate spine projects.
In-game, when the player interacts with the object I will get the character a set distance away (ie 100px) from the object, and then hide them both.

I will then load a 3rd seperate spine project which is just an animation of the character and the object interacting (getting in a car, climbing a ladder etc) but starting 100px away from each other so it matches with the pre-set start positions of the character and object as seperate projects.

Once this animation is complete, and character and object are at the final positions I will hide this animation, and show the original 2 skeletons again (character and object).

I am then able to Free the "interaction" animation/object, release it from memory and this way I can have as many "one-shot" animations as I want for an infinite number of objects using a very small memory footprint (think mobiles).

This saves having to have all possible animations loaded at runtime as (a) they aren't all included in 1 large file and (2) and will allow me to load and free them as they are needed during the game.

It will take some organisation in terms of alignment and makign sure things match up, but as long as I plan for it early I think it could work quite well.

Am I missing anything important that might mess up this plan?

Unless you need skeleton draw order changes during animation, you most likely don't need a 3rd project with merged skeletons. You can have 2 separate skeletons, position them both at the same position, and play an animation for each starting at the same time and they will be synchronized and can interact just like they do in the editor, no need to merge into one skeleton.

Animations are small, I would not optimize prematurely, even on mobile.

My reasoning for that method was so that I kept the ability to manipulate draw order during the interaction animation - the character might be in front of parts of an object, and behind others, going in between layers of the object.

I assumed runtime draw ordering was simply drawing the whole object (character in front of object or character behind object)

It would also be easier to do in the editor rather than doing it via code, unless I am misunderstanding?

Draw order, especially one skeleton going between images of another, is only possible by merging the two skeletons into one. You could use the event timeline to notify the runtime when to change the draw order, but that won't help one skeleton going between images of another.

mdidillon ：

I would love a programming tutorial that focus on the basic ideas behind your animationsystem, like simple animation playback, blending animation (transitions between two animations, e.g. going from walking to jump or jumping to falling), mixing animation (doing multiple animations in parrallel, e.g. walking and shooting). I have some problems with implementing my character controller that animations the player character, maybe it is also a result of some open bugs and just my own stupidness .

I second that Please!!! :$

Also I would love to see a video on collision detection using Spine, I think a lot of people would benefit from that.

Nate ：

Draw order, especially one skeleton going between images of another, is only possible by merging the two skeletons into one. You could use the event timeline to notify the runtime when to change the draw order, but that won't help one skeleton going between images of another.

Sorry to drag up an old thread, but I have just got around to coding the object interaction part of my game.

As per my previous posts, I was having trouble understanding the best way to implement the interaction of my character using an object (a vehicle for example), and after reading the suggestions I played around a little tonight and am still none the wiser as to how to approach it.

I do not want to have to include all possible animations the character 'might' do with each object in the character file, as I do not want everything loaded at startup - there is far too much data / images to load all at once - especially as what objects get used in-game is dependant on user input (whether they choose to use an object or not)

I then tried creating the animations within the object (to be interacted with) Spine project so that I could only load the animations once the object was selected by the user and going to be used by the character in-game.

So in Spine I create my object, and then 'Import' my character ready to get to work making them interact.
However, they are of course 2 separate skeletons/rigs and both have their own Draw Order rather than one shared Draw Order - meaning I cannot seem to make them go in front/behind/between each other as I had planned to do when animating.

I can't even use the new Keyable Draw Order feature to achieve this because as I have said they both have their own Draw Orders.

Any ideas on what I should be doing to achieve what I am after?

I have just started this part of the project so it is no problem if I have to start from scratch and approach this in a completely new direction that what I had planned, but I just cannot seem to get my head around what I need to do.

Any help appreciated, thanks.

Anyone got got any info/ideas?
I have a couple of free days this week and would like to get started if possible.

Thanks.

@DoobyDude, loading all skeleton data should be no problem. You can control when images are loaded by implementing your own AttachmentLoader and RegionAttachment. Instead of giving the RegionAttachment the texture region at load time, you can defer loading until later. Eg, outfit your skeleton with attachments, then before drawing it go through them all and give the RegionAttachments a texture region at that time.

You could implement a new attachment type that draws a skeleton instead of a region. Then you can attach this "SkeletonAttachment" to a slot just like a RegionAttachment and have it participate in the draw order. Eg, your vehicle would have a slot where you attach a SkeletonAttachment for your character skeleton.

Hi Shiu,

I suggest that all graphics and animation of examples are under your authorship. And I found it realy great! So my request not just about Spine "showhow" video, I would like to see how are you creating all that excelent parts of character, I want to know as much as possible little secrets about how to draw all the character's parts then to compose it in ideal animated legs, hands or anything else. Well yes, maybe it not just about Spine, but if your make some video illustrated all the process somewhere on youtube, it will be a real huge help for me to create better animation in Spine itself.

Thanks