Hello,
I read that Defold is now supporting Spine 4.0+ runtime. Does it mean that Dragonbones export in spine 3.3 json file no longer works in Defold?
I tried to follow Spine animation in Defold but I can’t make it work with Dragonbones files, after renaming .json into .spinejson I am getting an immediate error from Defold .
And what is the error?
I just try to open one of my old project with spine generated from Dragon Bones. It crash. I think it is expected because of the spine version and it is not a big deal for me, it is just a abandoned project. I can open it by removing the spine. Just in case, this is the error when Defold crash:
C [libSpineExt.dylib+0x29849] spSkeletonJson_readSkeletonData+0x14a9
It might be useful to add a message to scene like when a something missing instead of crash.
clojure.lang.ExceptionInfo: handler ':paste' in context ':asset-browser' failed at ':run' with message 'No method in multimethod 'perform' for dispatch value: null'
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: No method in multimethod 'perform' for dispatch value: null
@selimanac same here, after saving project won’t reopen, I have to delete dragonbones assets to make it work.
Not sure what we can do, other than try to parse the file manually, to try to look for a version number. Pull requests to the extension are welcome!
It would be good if the official runtime had a check for this (or just returned an error, and not crash)
Was anyone successful with using Dragonbones with the newest Defold (e.g. 1.6.3+) + extension-spine?
You won’t be able to do it with the newest version of spine in the extension. Breaking changes were introduced in Spine from 3.8 to 4. Nothing before 4 will load and work. Especially with IK and mesh.
Looks like the changes are not documented anywhere 
I was thinking of making somehow a script that could upgrade file from previous versions of spine jsons to 4.0, if only I would be able to figure out the changes.
But I guess Spine software can open e.g. 3.3 spine json and save it in 4.0 version perhaps? Its price rised tremendously since its Kickstarter 
I wonder if Essential version is really limited compared to Pro and, if I would try Essential would I be able to change json format in it
Yes spine has the ability to import from the json file and be saved in a current format. But if want IK and mesh you have to pay for the full version of Spine not just the essentials. Even if the 3.3 has them already saved, Spine will not open it correctly and delete all the info.
If you can animate your character without IK bones or Mesh transform then getting the Essentials is perfect. Now the only part about all of it is that in the end it’s almost better to only import the Skeleton/Animations from Spine and attach sprites to the bones. Especially since we are getting multiple textures on sprites. The most ideal solution is do like Unity and create an in house version of Spine that supports what Defold supports. Because even with the newest spine extension, not everything is functional.
Thank you @blisteredMind ! It explains it all to me 