Spine DragonBones

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sAint

Guest
I really need to get 2D bone animation software for my game. I want to have bone-driven events, characters moving their heads to look at things, and smooth transitioning between animations -- all awesome stuff that can't be achieved if I just import the frame-by-frame animations from any of the 2D bone options out there. Also, I'm going to have a LOT of characters loaded at once so I'm guessing I can push the number of loaded characters more with bones than with FBF.

I've been drooling over Spine Pro but $300 -- ouch. I could definitely do Essentials but I'm primarily a FBF animator and even though I'm using bones for the reasons I listed above, I still want the animations to really look the best that I can make them. One of the main focuses of my game is going to be the animations so I can't compromise on this.

I'm liking DragonBones and here's my question: can it really export to Spine format? I've been hearing that but I can't find anything to back that up on their website. If it does, does it play nice with GMS? (And GMS2 because I'll be getting that before the discount period ends). I don't want a bunch of headaches trying to get it to work right.
 

rIKmAN

Member
I really need to get 2D bone animation software for my game. I want to have bone-driven events, characters moving their heads to look at things, and smooth transitioning between animations -- all awesome stuff that can't be achieved if I just import the frame-by-frame animations from any of the 2D bone options out there. Also, I'm going to have a LOT of characters loaded at once so I'm guessing I can push the number of loaded characters more with bones than with FBF.

I've been drooling over Spine Pro but $300 -- ouch. I could definitely do Essentials but I'm primarily a FBF animator and even though I'm using bones for the reasons I listed above, I still want the animations to really look the best that I can make them. One of the main focuses of my game is going to be the animations so I can't compromise on this.

I'm liking DragonBones and here's my question: can it really export to Spine format? I've been hearing that but I can't find anything to back that up on their website. If it does, does it play nice with GMS? (And GMS2 because I'll be getting that before the discount period ends). I don't want a bunch of headaches trying to get it to work right.
I think DragonBones can export Spine compatible files, but they would only be of use to you if you were using runtimes that were not developed by Esoteric Software (creators of Spine).

GameMaker uses the official runtimes, which means that to use Spine animations in your GMS game you need a Spine licence, regardless of how you created the files (ie. using DragonBones), which also means that at that point you may as well use Spine to create the files as you would own a valid licence.

When you first import Spine files into the GMS IDE, you get a popup asking you to read and agree to the T&Cs of the Spine licence before you can continue.

More info can be found in this post here, where Nate (Spine developer) clarifies the situation after people were arguing regarding using DragonBones to export Spine files to use in GMS to circumvent the Spine licence requirements.

Spine is a great piece of software and I'd highly recommend it, although the GMS support isn't the greatest and is a bit basic - hopefully that will be improved over the lifetime of GMS2.

Also if you buy Essentials, the cost is deducted from the price of Pro should you choose to upgrade - or at least that used to be the case, so check that out yourself first to make sure it's still how it works.

Bottom line: If you want to use Spine in GMS, you need to own a Spine licence.
 
S

sAint

Guest
I think DragonBones can export Spine compatible files, but they would only be of use to you if you were using runtimes that were not developed by Esoteric Software (creators of Spine).

GameMaker uses the official runtimes, which means that to use Spine animations in your GMS game you need a Spine licence, regardless of how you created the files (ie. using DragonBones), which also means that at that point you may as well use Spine to create the files as you would own a valid licence.

When you first import Spine files into the GMS IDE, you get a popup asking you to read and agree to the T&Cs of the Spine licence before you can continue.

More info can be found in this post here, where Nate (Spine developer) clarifies the situation after people were arguing regarding using DragonBones to export Spine files to use in GMS to circumvent the Spine licence requirements.

Spine is a great piece of software and I'd highly recommend it, although the GMS support isn't the greatest and is a bit basic - hopefully that will be improved over the lifetime of GMS2.

Also if you buy Essentials, the cost is deducted from the price of Pro should you choose to upgrade - or at least that used to be the case, so check that out yourself first to make sure it's still how it works.

Bottom line: If you want to use Spine in GMS, you need to own a Spine licence.
Yeah, I thought it was weird hearing that DragonBones exported to a rival software's format. So its some kind of hack.

Thanks for clarifying. Believe me, I'm loving what I'm seeing so far of Spine but at that price, I was just worried that DragonBones, which has also piqued my interest, would come out with GMS support not long after I've dropped $300 on Spine Pro. So that's not looking likely?
 
T

Teddyboy16

Guest
Yeah, I thought it was weird hearing that DragonBones exported to a rival software's format. So its some kind of hack.

Thanks for clarifying. Believe me, I'm loving what I'm seeing so far of Spine but at that price, I was just worried that DragonBones, which has also piqued my interest, would come out with GMS support not long after I've dropped $300 on Spine Pro. So that's not looking likely?
You can upgrade at any time to spine professional once you buy the essential version. They deduct the $69 from the price of spine pro. It's not really a hack you just have to know what's in the file and how to parse it correctly. It can save in two different spine formats version 3.3 and I an older version that I forget at the moment. I'd have to look at dragonbones to see. I don't know how good it is, but if you really want to use the spine runtime this might be the cheapest way.

Dragonbones docs are outdated on the site, but it would be enough to get going. There's very little support for the application, but it's free. A lot of people seem to like it. Tutorials are few. I'm tempted to spring for spine essentials for the runtime and see how works.
 
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rIKmAN

Member
Spine itself is awesome and well worth the $69 for the Essentials version (and I think for Pro too but that's neither here nor there).

However the support for Spine in GMS is pretty basic, but Spine has runtimes for a myriad of other frameworks and languages that have much better functionality than GMS, so if you ever decide GMS just isn't working for you - you still have an awesome animation tool you can use whichever other engine/language you decide to use.

YYG might upgrade the Spine support and add some features to GMS soon, but the recurring theme seems to be that they update GMS support to an already old version of Spine, so we are always behind the latest runtimes and lacking basic features / functionality and forced to use on old version of the Spine IDE.
 
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