• Unity

  • Getting Jsons to work from Old Spine Version

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Hello, my friend and I have been using Spine for Unity for almost a year now. Until tonight, we were sticking with Spine 2.1.27 and Unity 5.0.

However, my friend has moved to Texas, and so to pick up the project on my own, I've purchased Spine Essential. I created a rig in 3.4 and tried to get it into Unity 5.0...but it didnt work. I finally decided to take the plunge and update to the latest version of Unity. My 3.4 Spine rig works...but the old ones do not. ( as Im to assume, its using deprecated features etc. ) I only have access to the old rig Json files, but cannot get them to open properly in Spine ( even previous versions ) so that I can re-export them.

The older Spine rigs I'm trying to open have Skinned meshes. Even though Im just reexporting, do I need to have the $300 Spine to open these properly? If I can't get these Spine characters ( about 5 of them ) to work, I'll probably have to revert back to Unity 5.0, and rollback to an older version of Spine I guess. ( but I still would have the problem of opening the old rigs for tweaking )

Are there any other problems I may run into when trying to get Spine 2.1.27 rigs to work in Unity 5.3 and the latest Spine?

Thank you so much!

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Hello! 2.1.27 to 3.4 is a huge jump and a major changes have happened in the underlying structure since then. This is the primary reason why old jsons don't work.
Between v2 and v3, even if it loaded, there is no guarantee that the animations would look the same. You can read more about the changes in v3 here: Blog: Spine 3.0.00 released
You can read more about cross-version compatibility here: Spine Unity Download
In that context, you would have redo all the animations that will break with the upgrade (could be nothing. could be everything). Or you could stick with 2.1

But Spine Pro is required for you to fully open, import, edit and re-export any skeletons/projects with Pro features.

I think the best case hackish scenario without any extra purchases is this:

  • You can hand-edit the text in the json a little, and be able to use it in spine-unity 3.2. This will be harder if it wasn't exported with "pretty print" since it won't have human-friendly formatting. You'll have to use a json editor in that case. And assuming none of the animations and skeletons used bone flip or relied on the way scaling used to behave in v2, this will mostly work just fine.
  • You would no longer be able to make edits to those skeletons unless you had Spine Pro. All the rest of your skeletons in your game going forward can just use Spine Essential features.

Or you ask your friend to re-export from his updated Spine version.

Thank you so much for getting back to me so quickly Pharan. I'll be sure to look at the Spine changelist and compatibility that you linked me to. Can you please clarify what would happen if I imported a 2.1.27 spine skeleton into Spine 3.4 and then exported from there? There's a chance all the animations would be broken? I'm fine with sticking with 2.1, but I upgraded to Unity 5.3, and a 2.1 json export won't work with that version right?

I'm fine with obtaining Spine Pro, but I'm not an animator, and would only use it for import/export ( and a few touch ups ). I'll only get Spine Pro if I know for certain that I'll be able to successfully import the older spine files and then export 3.4 versions of them without breaking them for Unity.

Thanks again!

If you were already using the old 2.1 runtime, that should still work in Unity 5.3.

Oh, that's good to hear. However, I think it would be beneficial in the long run to stick with the latest version, rather than staying with 2.1. I have one rig ( quick and dirty ) made in Spine 3.4, and about five in 2.1. If I buy Spine Pro, and import the old jsons, will I be able to get them ( and their animations ) up to the latest version of Spine 3.4? Or am I pretty much stuck with using the Spine version they were created in? I'd love to get them all on the latest version 🙂
Like I said, I'm happy to purchase Spine Pro if I know that my 2.1 json rigs will successfully export to 3.4 and then import back into Unity ( with some minor tweaks to patch up the version discrepancies. )

Again, thank you for getting back so quickly!

You can set your Spine to use version 2.1.27 and develop new skeletons in that version. This would enable you to use the old runtimes and a number of your problems will go away.

Ideally you want to import the old project files, not the JSON files. If all you have is JSON files, you can try the JsonRollback tool here:
Spine editor and runtime version management

You can use the trial to try out project and data import before updating to Pro.

Hey Nate,
thanks for pointing out the JsonRollback tool!! I didn't know it existed, and I'd like to try it for getting my one 3.4 rig onto 2.1 Spine.

I wish I had the old Spine files, but I don't think I'll get access to them anytime soon. All I got are the jsons for now. I've tried Spine Trial, but it doesn't allow to switch back to older versions. The 2.1 jsons Dont import in unfortunately. I could import the json into 2.1, save it as a project and open it in the Trial version maybe, but since I dont have Pro, I don't think it'll save the imported json for me.

I think I'm going to rollback to the 2.1.27 runtimes and work with that in Unity 5.3 until I eventually purchase Spine Pro. Then I'll try getting the 2.1 jsons upgraded. Hopefully that works out. Otherwise, I'll have to reinstall Unity 5.0 and rollback my entire project in version control. It's not too big a deal if I have to redo the one 3.4 rig into 2.1.27 to match the others