[HN Gopher] Spine - 2D skeletal animation for games, with physic...
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Spine - 2D skeletal animation for games, with physical secondary
motions
Author : diggan
Score : 119 points
Date : 2024-08-16 17:40 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.esotericsoftware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.esotericsoftware.com)
| telchior wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Blender (via 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Johanx64 wrote:
| Spine is extremely polished, thought out and well written
| piece of software. Expecting that somebody will do this
| kind of highest quality work for free is ludicrous.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| You could say the same about Blender, Krita and a bunch
| of other open source programs.
| badlogic wrote:
| We actually come from a strong FOSS background (Kryo,
| libGDX, and more).
|
| For Spine, FOSS didn't make sense to us, as you either
| end up with open-core, which over time will shift
| incentives to work on the proprietary parts, or a
| donation based funding model, which is stressful and
| unpredictable.
| ugh123 wrote:
| It just seems like a "money grab" for them to claim a chunk
| of success for my game/product each year when I probably
| don't need any more support for the tool than when I was <
| $500k/year in revenue.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| If you could make 500k/year (and lets say it reduces to a
| drastic 200k after taxes/platform cuts), I don't see why
| paying 1.25% (+0.2% per extra seat) is a hard ask for a
| core tech.
| nox101 wrote:
| This is all true but tons of the industry functions on FMOD,
| Havok, RadTools, and many other proprietary dependencies.
| taneq wrote:
| The enterprise license here seems pretty reasonable.
| $2.5k/yr+$370/yr per extra seat with no revenue share, and no
| cutoff for your existing products at the end of the year.
| mmooss wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Price your software they way you want Spine to price theirs,
| and you'll fall under the 500K threshold and be all set.
| wredue wrote:
| I love the developers are seeing that they deserve to be paid
| for their work and that corporations do not deserve to make
| money hand over fist for free.
|
| More developers, especially "open source" ones, need to be
| charging corporations for their work.
| badlogic wrote:
| The Enterprise license doesn't claim any revenue share. It's a
| subscription model that triggers above a revenue threshold. It
| cross-finances the non-enterprise, pay once lifetime licenses
| for individuals, which get updates forever.
| thegolyo wrote:
| Spine is used extensively in the gambling industry for 2d slot
| machines, so it makes sense to have a licensing model to
| accomodate these users, while still offering a tier for indie
| devs.
| torginus wrote:
| Isn't this trivial to get around? What if you worked with
| individual art contractors (which is not that uncommon in of
| itself), then the revenue requirement wouldn't manifest on your
| side, but theirs.
| badlogic wrote:
| It's fine if they don't use the Spine Runtimes to playback
| animations, i.e. via sprite sheets. Most will want to use the
| Spine Runtimes though, which requires them to have a Spine
| license.
| a1o wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
|
| "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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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
| rafram wrote:
| Presumably, if you're writing a Spine runtime, it's because
| you'd like to integrate it into one of your own projects in
| an environment that they don't officially support. I'm not
| sure why you'd take on that "work" if you didn't already
| have a license.
| badlogic wrote:
| The license explicitely allows that. Basically all third party
| integrations do exactly that.
| a1o wrote:
| That's not what you wrote here
|
| https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spine-
| runtimes/issues/20...
| badlogic wrote:
| No, that's exactly what I meant. The author says they want
| to write a plugin which uses spine-cpp to render Spine
| skeletons.
|
| A user of that plugin needs a Spine Editor license. The
| author of the plugin does not. Users of the engine not
| using the plugin do not need a license either. That's how
| integrations with e.g. GameMaker, Defold, etc. have worked
| for years.
| taormina wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Is Rive at all comparable?
|
| https://rive.app/editor
|
| The open sourced their renderer recently
|
| https://rive.app/blog/rive-renderer-now-open-source-and-avai...
| taormina wrote:
| It's a comparable tool, yes, and common in the industry, but I
| have not personally used it yet.
| n4te wrote:
| The Bay Area start up money bought nice marketing that makes
| it look popular, but it's not really.
| pier25 wrote:
| Rive does skeletal animation and a lot more.
| diggan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Cursory question - what's with the 'screenshots' that look like
| they're photos of the screen taken with a smartphone?
| lancesells wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| A lesser known 2D project feature in Blender :
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| so if you re making a 2d three.js or webgl game you dont
| recommend it?
| badlogic wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.spineviewe...
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