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ERROR: Using Spine Meshes and Weights

Sam

Member
Hello!

I've been using Spine by Esoteric Software to create animations to import into Game Maker.
Here's my steps before I get an error:
1. I can add an image to an animation.
2. I can give the animation motion through translations and rotations.
3. I can export to Game Maker at this point perfectly. The animations are perfect.
4. I make an image into a mesh. This still works and exports fine.
5. I attach a mesh to a bone, and give it weight. This is where it breaks, and exports into Game Maker as a mess of triangles, looking like a pointy mess in-game.

Does Game Maker Studio not support meshes with weights? Any solutions here?
 
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Insanebrio

Guest
I heared months ago that the free form deforming was not working (which is strange since primitives works on studio) so i think that you cant do anything about that. I have the standard version of Spine, so I can only say what i saw before.
 

Didjargo

Member
Personal experience dictates that using Spine with Game Maker is not a viable option as of yet. Spine animation in GM is really unstable often resulting in disproportionate scaling, missing images within animations, and outright game crashes. And GM's runtime compatibility is way behind the current version of Spine. As much as it would greatly elevate the visual capabilities of GM games, I recommend sticking to standard sprite animations. At least until an update comes around that fixes all of those problems. I suppose that Spine is still useful for building the animations and exporting them as PNG sequences.
 
I use Spine for GameMaker all the time (with weighted meshes) and I find next to zero problems with it? Are you using the correct version of Spine? :)
GameMaker's runtime is for version 2.1.08, though I personally use 2.1.27 since it still works. Anything newer will cause problems though.
 

FredFredrickson

Artist, designer, & developer
GMC Elder
Personal experience dictates that using Spine with Game Maker is not a viable option as of yet. Spine animation in GM is really unstable often resulting in disproportionate scaling, missing images within animations, and outright game crashes. And GM's runtime compatibility is way behind the current version of Spine. As much as it would greatly elevate the visual capabilities of GM games, I recommend sticking to standard sprite animations. At least until an update comes around that fixes all of those problems. I suppose that Spine is still useful for building the animations and exporting them as PNG sequences.
Not to get too far off topic here, but ...this is not quite true. I am using Spine for one of my projects and it seems to work fine. I have noticed some things like scaling not carrying over to child objects correctly, and occasionally some wonkiness with scaling down to 0 or below - but those things are pretty easy to work around.
 

Sam

Member
Thanks, guys! The problem was that I was using the newest version of Spine, which GM doesn't fully support yet. I reverted back to an older build and it works perfectly.

I was bummed, however, to see that it doesn't have full access to bounding boxes made in Spine for collision! So with the inspiration from BlessHayGaming's marketplace resource for Spine's Events in GM, I've made a resource for drawing/collision checking bounding boxes in GM that are defined/drawn/animated in Spine!
 
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Insanebrio

Guest
I use Sp ) GameMaker all the time (with weighted meshes) and I find next to zero problems with it? Are you using the correct version of Spine? :)
GameMaker's runtime is for version 2.1.08, though I personally use 2.1.27 since it still works. Anything newer will cause problems though.
WAIT WAIT WAIT!!!
Are you telling me that you have spine pro and that (with an older version of spine) the free form deformation works fine? If so, i might spend 200€ soon to upgrade my essentials version :D
 
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Ulcius

Guest
hey guys, I see you had similiar problems and here I am running in circles. I made bunch of animations using meshes on spine 3.3.07. Tried exporting them to GM with no use. Finally, I exported my aniamtions to json, downgraded spine to 2.1.27, imported json to dowgraded spine aaaand yeah they imported, but completly losing all keys with deformations in my animation (in setup meshes are visible though). Other transformation imported allright. Now, exporting that to GM worked just fine, but i really need my deformation, cant imagine to make them anew in spine 2.1.27. Do you have any idea what can help? Am i missing something with importing json to dowgraded spine?
Spare my life and help please :D
 
hey guys, I see you had similiar problems and here I am running in circles. I made bunch of animations using meshes on spine 3.3.07. Tried exporting them to GM with no use. Finally, I exported my aniamtions to json, downgraded spine to 2.1.27, imported json to dowgraded spine aaaand yeah they imported, but completly losing all keys with deformations in my animation (in setup meshes are visible though). Other transformation imported allright. Now, exporting that to GM worked just fine, but i really need my deformation, cant imagine to make them anew in spine 2.1.27. Do you have any idea what can help? Am i missing something with importing json to dowgraded spine?
Spare my life and help please :D
Some things in the json files is named differently in the two versions, so try making a test mesh animation in Spine 2.1.27, export, open the json in a text editor and see what meshes are called in this file. Then open your 3.3.07 json in a text editor, and make sure the same names are used :)
 
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Ulcius

Guest
Some things in the json files is named differently in the two versions, so try making a test mesh animation in Spine 2.1.27, export, open the json in a text editor and see what meshes are called in this file. Then open your 3.3.07 json in a text editor, and make sure the same names are used :)
great, many thanks, it solved everything and i finally got my meshes in the game!

If it helps anyone else in future: for me it was to change word "deform" (spine 3.3.07) into "ffd" (spine 2.1.27) and when there are weights on your mesh change "mesh" (spine 3.3.07) into "skinnedmesh" (spine 2.1.27) . Tha last thing is only for meshes with weighs, if mesh doesn't use weights changing word 'mesh 'into skinnedmesh' will crash everything and json won't import
 

rIKmAN

Member
Can anyone give a rundown, or a link to official info on what actual Spine features are supported by GM:S please?

I'm a recent Humble purchaser and after seeing Spine support advertised front and centre on the website I am pretty disappointed after reading a few threads and comments that it seems to be pretty lacking in reality.

You can't even do a non-looping animation - is that correct?
 
Can anyone give a rundown, or a link to official info on what actual Spine features are supported by GM:S please?

I'm a recent Humble purchaser and after seeing Spine support advertised front and centre on the website I am pretty disappointed after reading a few threads and comments that it seems to be pretty lacking in reality.

You can't even do a non-looping animation - is that correct?
Of course you can do a non-looping animation - image speed works just the same, and the animation end event triggers when an animation ends :) Though if you do layered animations (tracks), then things gets.. Yeah, it can be pretty troublesome on the other tracks :)
But you can use most of the features (which existed in version 2.1.27), with some kinks and exceptions though... But some of these can be worked around, and I still really hope they will update it soon ;)
 
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BlueSlime

Guest
Afaik, there is a BIG update coming to spine in the next few weeks... and it should add a lot of extra functionality and a few new functions too. Look out for it in EA first I think. ;)
OMG I hope this happens!!!!
 

rIKmAN

Member
Afaik, there is a BIG update coming to spine in the next few weeks... and it should add a lot of extra functionality and a few new functions too. Look out for it in EA first I think. ;)
After using runtimes in other languages that are pretty feature complete, the GM runtimes were a big letdown for me so this is great news.

Could you elaborate on the new functionality at all?
 
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