Spine: an animation tool that focuses on 2D animation for games

[scrollaway]

I used Spine a while back. It's such a lovely tool with a great UI, and compatible with Linux.

It's neither free nor open source though so I don't know if this is very suitable here on HN.

In any case, I wrote an exporter for Inkscape since they only had an Illustrator plugin for vector graphics:

https://github.com/jleclanche/inkscape-spine-exporter

[aptwebapps]

There's absolutely nothing in either HN's guidelines or general culture to exclude non-free software (in either sense).

[galaktor]

fwiw, Spine is made using libgdx [1], which is open source. The various stretch-goal animation runtimes are also available [2] on Github.

AFAIK the team behind both libgdx and Spine are quite good at giving back to the community. After libgdx they quit their day jobs and went full-time as Esoteric Software [3] and did an excellent job following through with Spine's two kickstarters.

I think this is very relevant to HN not only because of the guys' open source contributions but also their entrepreneurial history (success?).

[1] https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx [2] https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spine-runtimes [3] http://esotericsoftware.com/

(I'm not affiliated with ES but was a backer of Spine and am a user of libgdx)

[veli_joza]

The Inkscape to Spine exporter sounds very interesting. It would be great if your repo also included an example SVG and maybe a screenshot so users can get a feeling of functionality.

[j2bax]

Our company seriously pursued using Spine for all of our in game 2D animations in small to medium sized budget projects. Unfortunately the runtime license was far to costly and restrictive to use for work for hire type client work, of which most of our work is. Really wish we could just pay a flat fee rather than cause all sorts of red tape and recurring payments for our clients. Most of the games we produce are for not for profits that can't really justify those kinds of recurring costs. Ultimately, we built our own tool that I'm sure is far more primitive but gets the job done.

[eps]

Not sure I understand - are you referring to $299 Pro license or are you a 500K+ enterprise and have an issue with $2200 license?

[madebysquares]

I wonder if they have any special considerations for non profit companies

[joeyjojo]

A similar animation tool that I use regularly is Flump, which exports nested Flash animations as texture atlases and XML. It is a fantastic tool if you are an ex-Flash developer looking for a fast workflow with great animation performance.

I have just released a runtime that supports canvas/webgl through PixiJS. It is currently available for Haxe developers but I will be releasing a bower package soon.

https://github.com/tconkling/flump

https://github.com/jackwlee01/pixi-flump-runtime

[orillian]

I backed the kickstarter for this tool back when it came out and I'm glad I did. I don't do a lot of this type of thing, but overall it's the quickest and easiest one I've used! It's been a boon for making small animations for many of the quick projects I've worked on. Keep meaning to do something real and proper with it, but I've yet to take the time.

Every time I go to use it, it's getting an update and new runtimes. No complaints at all!

[danbolt]

Spine is really neat, and they have a lot of features that enable you to make cool animations really quickly.

I remember some of the rendering functionality stressed the Xbox 360's garbage collector back with the XNA version. I'd be curious to hear if people have used it with MonoGame on mobile devices.

[ngokevin]

Works pretty well with in the browser with A-Frame too: http://joshgalvin.github.io/post/project/aframe-spine/

[timmyelliot]

We considered Spine. It was easy to use and enjoyable to work with. For 2D, we ended up with Maya LT exporting to Unity, not only was Maya more versatile as a 3D engine, I believe it ended up being more cost effective.

[j2bax]

I'd be interested to hear more about your experience using Maya LT for a 2D art flow to Unity. Does your art start in Maya or are you importing from another application?

[aschearer]

Anyone have experience using this with Unity? What's the workflow like? Does it use much memory? How does it effect the framerate?

[notbingo]

Where is the button to play the animation in the trial version?

[CliffyA]

If you click "Setup" in the top left it will switch to animation mode and you can play from there.