Hierarchy of embedded animations

meps

I need to embed animated hand weapon (i.e. glowing sword or rotating minigun) into animation of unit. Moreover I want to freely change this weapon in runtime. Each internal animation may or may not be syncronized with external one. For example weapon can have animations as IDLE, FIRE, RELOADING and unit can have animations IDLE, STAND, RUN, WALK, so it can shoot or reload on the run or in stand position.
Is it possible to do in standard runtimes? What's the best practice to solve this problem?

Mario

What runtime are you using?

meps

Spine-ts + WebGL backend

Mario

The way this is handled at the moment is as follows: Your outer skeleton (e.g. your character) has a draw order of slots. Your inner skeleton (the weapon) should be rendered at some place in that draw order. To do that, you first render the outer skeleton slots until the slot at which the inner skeleton should be rendered. Next you render the inner skeleton. Finally, you render the remaining slots of the outer skeleton.

The spine-ts SkeletonRenderer of the WebGL backend currently renders all slots of a skeleton. I've added an issue for a feature that lets you render only a range of slots of a skeleton here [cocos2d] add SkeletonRenderer::setSlotRange(startSlot, endSlot) to render only slots in that range · #1075. I'll also add an example when fixing this issue.

meps

Thanks! I've supposed that this feature is quite common task in gamedev.

Mario

It is, but you can also achieve this by placing weapons in your skeleton via skins. If you want to keep skeletons of your characters and weapons separate, the above feature is for you. I've finished implementing it (3.6 and 3.7-beta branch). You can find an example here spine-runtimes/test-slot-range.html at 3.6

Here's it in action http://rawgit.com/esotericsoftware/spine-runtimes/3.6/spine-ts/webgl/tests/test-slot-range.html

meps

Looks great! Just right that I need.