4 ms·

Spine – 2D skeletal animation for games, with physical secondary motions

128 points by diggan 2y ago

telchior 2y ago
Spine is really lovely. It was great back in 2019 when I used it to release a game. They released the 4.0 version a year later with a lot of updates and while I have no plans to make another 2D side-scrolling type of game... this one piece of software is what makes it tempting. The thing I REALLY appreciate is the lifetime license. Checking my emails, I bought the professional version in 2015 for $289. Now it's almost a decade later, still getting awesome updates, and I can still get the latest version. Totally unlike the current trend... I'm looking at you, $20 / month for Speedtree.
- marcinzm 2y ago
  I mean, Spline seems to do the same thing if your company makes enough money: >Spine Enterprise is required for businesses with $500,000 USD or more annual revenue. The license allows Spine Enterprise to be used by the specified number of users for a period of one year. All updates are provided during this time. After one year, Spine Enterprise must be licensed again to continue using Spine Enterprise.
  - telchior 2y ago
    I didn't know that! Pretty sure the enterprise license didn't exist when I bought it. I like these honour system enterprise licenses better than never-ending subscriptions, but they are becoming too common in the game industry.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      common anywhere. Even if you paid only $3 a month 10 years ago, that subscription would still be more expensive to a lifetime professional as of now ($360) than your upfront price of $289. maybe a bit cheaper when you adjust inflation, but another year would close that gap. So you get the allure from the business side, since they are also continually spending time and probably labor updating the tech.
- animal531 2y ago
  I feel(/felt) the same way about ZBrush. I bought my copy probably a decade ago and have received free upgrades since them. Now of course they've been bought by Maxon and the price is now about 33 bucks a monnth.
ugh123 2y ago
Spine is cool, but I find it ridiculous for more and more tool software for games to force Enterprise licenses, rev share, etc onto developers. >Businesses with more than $500,000 USD annual revenue require a Spine Enterprise license
- yellowapple 2y ago
  If you're making $500k/year in revenue, Spine's license cost is probably the least of your worries. I tend to be averse to proprietary dependencies more from a maintainability/longevity aspect than a cost aspect. If Esoteric Software goes out of business, who develops future versions of Spine? Are they kind enough to open-source it before turning the lights off? Does it get sold to some other company that runs it into the ground? Does development just cease? Are there licensing servers that the tools and SDKs and such have to ping to be functional, and if so, what happens when those servers shut down?
  - a1o 2y ago
    To be honest I am surprised there isn't an open source alternative for this type of animation in 2D - I only know of blender and lottie as somewhat closer to it but nothing that is quite like Spine.
    - npinsker 2y ago
      Blender (via https://github.com/ndee85/coa_tools https://github.com/ndee85/coa_tools) and Godot's Skeleton2D node are both open-source. I'd assume Spine's advanced features far outpace them, but I also suspect the need for such features is rare.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      2D skeletal animation is an order of magnitude easier than 3d, but still a huge task in and of itself, with unique issues working with sprites compared to meshes. So it still requires very skilled understanding of art and physics, but there's a lot less demand as the AA/AAA industry is 99% 3d in the west. It's not open source, but the best competitor to Spine is probably Live2D, which is used by a lot of Eastern studios (and basically dominant in the mobile space). You'd probably find some open source implementations over in Japan.
a1o 2y ago
It would be great if it was possible to develop a plugin for an engine to load spine in a game and let the decision of the license to the game developer (and not the engine developer). Right now you either are blessed that the spine devs decided to care for your engine or you aren't. It would be nice if a FOSS engine dev could develop a Spine plugin and then a game dev that was thinking about that engine could either opt to use it or not.
- taormina 2y ago
  This is basically what the community is already doing. This is the package I've been using in Flame and its license (https://pub.dev/packages/flame_spine https://pub.dev/packages/flame_spine). "License The code and all associated assets of the flame_spine package is distributed under the MIT License (see the LICENSE file). HOWEVER, as flame_spine includes Spine Runtime libraries, your use of flame_spine in your games or other products is also subject to the terms and conditions of the Spine Runtime License Agreement (see the LICENSE file). In particular, in order to use flame_spine you are required to obtain a valid Spine Editor License."
  - a1o 2y ago
    In the legalese text it's written in way that the person that is making the plugin must also hold a license which is too much, not going to pay to do work.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      >the person that is making the plugin must also hold a license which is too much, not going to pay to do work. I suppose the idea is that you're paying to work on something that will make you money. And then if you have a FOSS mentality you can share that for others using your engine. But I'm sure there's wiggle room if you contact. if you're an up and coming engine and are interested I'm sure Spine only has to gain by having its tech ready to go with it.
    - n4te 2y ago
      Anyone can distribute the Spine Runtimes without a Spine license, but they have to attach the Spine Runtimes license, which means the need for a Spine license is pushed down the line to their users. In this way someone without a Spine license can use the Spine Runtimes in game toolkits/etc without having a license themselves. https://esotericsoftware.com/spine-runtimes-license https://esotericsoftware.com/spine-runtimes-license
taormina 2y ago
Spine is fantastic. I'm using it for my latest game, Danger World. All of the animations my artists are working on are done in Spine and I'm able to use a bridge package that someone wrote to integrate what I need into Flame's engine.
nox101 2y ago
Is Rive at all comparable? https://rive.app/editor https://rive.app/editor The open sourced their renderer recently https://rive.app/blog/rive-renderer-now-open-source-and-available-on-all-platforms https://rive.app/blog/rive-renderer-now-open-source-and-avai...
- taormina 2y ago
  It's a comparable tool, yes, and common in the industry, but I have not personally used it yet.
  - n4te 2y ago
    The Bay Area start up money bought nice marketing that makes it look popular, but it's not really.
- pier25 2y ago
  Rive does skeletal animation and a lot more.
- diggan 2y ago
  Slightly different target use cases. You'd use Rive for your UI, but not necessarily your player character and other things that you want animated "with" the gameplay. For that, you'd use Spine.
  - animal531 2y ago
    Yeah, although there are Rive examples using it as a game it's really targeted to vector-art your UI and allows you to create animations inside their software, which you then just play in whichever engine (such as Unity etc).
rkagerer 2y ago
Cursory question - what's with the 'screenshots' that look like they're photos of the screen taken with a smartphone?
- kroltan 2y ago
  It is a popular design convention, there are even generators to convert regular screenshots into this angled and depth-of-field style. There are 2 important properties this convention has: First, it makes it obvious that the UI being presented is not part of the website, but a screenshot, so people don't trying to mess with it like it's an interactive widget. Second, it showcases a general feature without inviting scrutinising the details of the UI, which a general product page isn't the best place to do so anyways. --- (Personally I do love a good software Screenshots page, but that can be a separate thing IMO)
  - rkagerer 2y ago
    Do they add Moire lines for realism? Some of those shots seemed to have them.
lancesells 2y ago
At one point in my life I did a lot of work animating comic book art for various projects. I wish this existed back then. It would have made the work so much better.
- Joel_Mckay 2y ago
  A lesser known 2D project feature in Blender : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5epzCprCdGc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5epzCprCdGc The program is tolerable if you take a course to learn the silly shortcut key interface, and spend about $300 on after market plugins. =3
yalok 2y ago
I have had suspicions for a while that the whole product is built & sold by just 1 person... if this is true, that's just amazing.
- n4te 2y ago
  Close! It was 1 dev and 1 artist for a long time. Eventually the runtime and support load became too high and it's slowly grown to 9 people. Running lean was satisfying but exhausting.
CountHackulus 2y ago
Spine is fantastic for artists, and it's integrations with various engines is really good. My biggest complaint about it is that it's very CPU heavy. A spine runtime that has less features but uses GPU skinning would be excellent, especially if it runs on the web. Ages ago I had to write a JS shim to the C runtime compiled to WASM and it worked well, but I still wish it used a lot more GPU and less CPU.
- retinaros 2y ago
  so if you re making a 2d three.js or webgl game you dont recommend it?
  - badlogic 2y ago
    It's being used by a lot of companies with WebGL tech stacks mostly deployed on low-powered slot machines. Quite a few web games in the Asian market also use it. However, three.js likely won't add anything for a 2D game. You'd be better served with Phaser or PixiJS (which is the industry standard in slot games it seems).
- badlogic 2y ago
  The skinning could be done GPU side but with caveats: the number of bones that can influence a vertex would be limited and matrix palettes might have to be split up, inducing multiple draw calls. There actually was a GPU skinner at some point iirc, and the load for common example skeletons was pretty much the same sadly.
coolerinc 2y ago
If you need to check your spine skeleton on android device - there's a free app Spine Viewer https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spineviewer https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spineviewe...
dangsux 2y ago
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128 points by diggan 2y ago

Spine is really lovely. It was great back in 2019 when I used it to release a game. They released the 4.0 version a year later with a lot of updates and while I have no plans to make another 2D side-scrolling type of game... this one piece of software is what makes it tempting. The thing I REALLY appreciate is the lifetime license. Checking my emails, I bought the professional version in 2015 for $289. Now it's almost a decade later, still getting awesome updates, and I can still get the latest version. Totally unlike the current trend... I'm looking at you, $20 / month for Speedtree.

marcinzm 2y ago
I mean, Spline seems to do the same thing if your company makes enough money: >Spine Enterprise is required for businesses with $500,000 USD or more annual revenue. The license allows Spine Enterprise to be used by the specified number of users for a period of one year. All updates are provided during this time. After one year, Spine Enterprise must be licensed again to continue using Spine Enterprise.
- telchior 2y ago
  I didn't know that! Pretty sure the enterprise license didn't exist when I bought it. I like these honour system enterprise licenses better than never-ending subscriptions, but they are becoming too common in the game industry.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    common anywhere. Even if you paid only $3 a month 10 years ago, that subscription would still be more expensive to a lifetime professional as of now ($360) than your upfront price of $289. maybe a bit cheaper when you adjust inflation, but another year would close that gap. So you get the allure from the business side, since they are also continually spending time and probably labor updating the tech.
animal531 2y ago
I feel(/felt) the same way about ZBrush. I bought my copy probably a decade ago and have received free upgrades since them. Now of course they've been bought by Maxon and the price is now about 33 bucks a monnth.

ugh123 2y ago

Spine is cool, but I find it ridiculous for more and more tool software for games to force Enterprise licenses, rev share, etc onto developers. >Businesses with more than $500,000 USD annual revenue require a Spine Enterprise license

yellowapple 2y ago
If you're making $500k/year in revenue, Spine's license cost is probably the least of your worries. I tend to be averse to proprietary dependencies more from a maintainability/longevity aspect than a cost aspect. If Esoteric Software goes out of business, who develops future versions of Spine? Are they kind enough to open-source it before turning the lights off? Does it get sold to some other company that runs it into the ground? Does development just cease? Are there licensing servers that the tools and SDKs and such have to ping to be functional, and if so, what happens when those servers shut down?
- a1o 2y ago
  To be honest I am surprised there isn't an open source alternative for this type of animation in 2D - I only know of blender and lottie as somewhat closer to it but nothing that is quite like Spine.
  - npinsker 2y ago
    Blender (via https://github.com/ndee85/coa_tools https://github.com/ndee85/coa_tools) and Godot's Skeleton2D node are both open-source. I'd assume Spine's advanced features far outpace them, but I also suspect the need for such features is rare.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    2D skeletal animation is an order of magnitude easier than 3d, but still a huge task in and of itself, with unique issues working with sprites compared to meshes. So it still requires very skilled understanding of art and physics, but there's a lot less demand as the AA/AAA industry is 99% 3d in the west. It's not open source, but the best competitor to Spine is probably Live2D, which is used by a lot of Eastern studios (and basically dominant in the mobile space). You'd probably find some open source implementations over in Japan.

a1o 2y ago

It would be great if it was possible to develop a plugin for an engine to load spine in a game and let the decision of the license to the game developer (and not the engine developer). Right now you either are blessed that the spine devs decided to care for your engine or you aren't. It would be nice if a FOSS engine dev could develop a Spine plugin and then a game dev that was thinking about that engine could either opt to use it or not.

taormina 2y ago
This is basically what the community is already doing. This is the package I've been using in Flame and its license (https://pub.dev/packages/flame_spine https://pub.dev/packages/flame_spine). "License The code and all associated assets of the flame_spine package is distributed under the MIT License (see the LICENSE file). HOWEVER, as flame_spine includes Spine Runtime libraries, your use of flame_spine in your games or other products is also subject to the terms and conditions of the Spine Runtime License Agreement (see the LICENSE file). In particular, in order to use flame_spine you are required to obtain a valid Spine Editor License."
- a1o 2y ago
  In the legalese text it's written in way that the person that is making the plugin must also hold a license which is too much, not going to pay to do work.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    >the person that is making the plugin must also hold a license which is too much, not going to pay to do work. I suppose the idea is that you're paying to work on something that will make you money. And then if you have a FOSS mentality you can share that for others using your engine. But I'm sure there's wiggle room if you contact. if you're an up and coming engine and are interested I'm sure Spine only has to gain by having its tech ready to go with it.
  - n4te 2y ago
    Anyone can distribute the Spine Runtimes without a Spine license, but they have to attach the Spine Runtimes license, which means the need for a Spine license is pushed down the line to their users. In this way someone without a Spine license can use the Spine Runtimes in game toolkits/etc without having a license themselves. https://esotericsoftware.com/spine-runtimes-license https://esotericsoftware.com/spine-runtimes-license

taormina 2y ago

Spine is fantastic. I'm using it for my latest game, Danger World. All of the animations my artists are working on are done in Spine and I'm able to use a bridge package that someone wrote to integrate what I need into Flame's engine.

nox101 2y ago

Is Rive at all comparable? https://rive.app/editor https://rive.app/editor The open sourced their renderer recently https://rive.app/blog/rive-renderer-now-open-source-and-available-on-all-platforms https://rive.app/blog/rive-renderer-now-open-source-and-avai...

taormina 2y ago
It's a comparable tool, yes, and common in the industry, but I have not personally used it yet.
- n4te 2y ago
  The Bay Area start up money bought nice marketing that makes it look popular, but it's not really.
pier25 2y ago
Rive does skeletal animation and a lot more.
diggan 2y ago
Slightly different target use cases. You'd use Rive for your UI, but not necessarily your player character and other things that you want animated "with" the gameplay. For that, you'd use Spine.
- animal531 2y ago
  Yeah, although there are Rive examples using it as a game it's really targeted to vector-art your UI and allows you to create animations inside their software, which you then just play in whichever engine (such as Unity etc).

rkagerer 2y ago

Cursory question - what's with the 'screenshots' that look like they're photos of the screen taken with a smartphone?

kroltan 2y ago
It is a popular design convention, there are even generators to convert regular screenshots into this angled and depth-of-field style. There are 2 important properties this convention has: First, it makes it obvious that the UI being presented is not part of the website, but a screenshot, so people don't trying to mess with it like it's an interactive widget. Second, it showcases a general feature without inviting scrutinising the details of the UI, which a general product page isn't the best place to do so anyways. --- (Personally I do love a good software Screenshots page, but that can be a separate thing IMO)
- rkagerer 2y ago
  Do they add Moire lines for realism? Some of those shots seemed to have them.

lancesells 2y ago

At one point in my life I did a lot of work animating comic book art for various projects. I wish this existed back then. It would have made the work so much better.

Joel_Mckay 2y ago
A lesser known 2D project feature in Blender : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5epzCprCdGc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5epzCprCdGc The program is tolerable if you take a course to learn the silly shortcut key interface, and spend about $300 on after market plugins. =3

yalok 2y ago

I have had suspicions for a while that the whole product is built & sold by just 1 person... if this is true, that's just amazing.

n4te 2y ago
Close! It was 1 dev and 1 artist for a long time. Eventually the runtime and support load became too high and it's slowly grown to 9 people. Running lean was satisfying but exhausting.

CountHackulus 2y ago

Spine is fantastic for artists, and it's integrations with various engines is really good. My biggest complaint about it is that it's very CPU heavy. A spine runtime that has less features but uses GPU skinning would be excellent, especially if it runs on the web. Ages ago I had to write a JS shim to the C runtime compiled to WASM and it worked well, but I still wish it used a lot more GPU and less CPU.

retinaros 2y ago
so if you re making a 2d three.js or webgl game you dont recommend it?
- badlogic 2y ago
  It's being used by a lot of companies with WebGL tech stacks mostly deployed on low-powered slot machines. Quite a few web games in the Asian market also use it. However, three.js likely won't add anything for a 2D game. You'd be better served with Phaser or PixiJS (which is the industry standard in slot games it seems).
badlogic 2y ago
The skinning could be done GPU side but with caveats: the number of bones that can influence a vertex would be limited and matrix palettes might have to be split up, inducing multiple draw calls. There actually was a GPU skinner at some point iirc, and the load for common example skeletons was pretty much the same sadly.

coolerinc 2y ago

If you need to check your spine skeleton on android device - there's a free app Spine Viewer https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spineviewer https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spineviewe...

dangsux 2y ago

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