What’s the reason Defold doesn’t use Spine’s lua runtime for its spine support?
(I assume it doesn’t because it doesn’t support all spine features)
If it does behind the scenes, what’s the reason that not all spine features are exposed in Defold?
I believe it’s a licensing issue (correct me if I’m wrong guys). To be able to use the Spine runtime you need to have a Spine license. You can’t for example use one of the runtimes but use Dragonbones (which can produce spine compatible files) to work on your animations
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We use our own runtime. It’s brought both good and bad things with it over the years. One advantage is the shared code between spine and model components, resulting in a smaller runtime overall. Another is the performance of our implementation that is tailor made for the engine, thus resulting in better performance. Disadvantages also exist of course. We’ve had quite a few spine relates bugs over the years and we’re not supporting the latest version.
We will do two things: 1. Extract our implementation into a native extension. 2. Add missing extension sdk functions so that we can support the official spine runtime.
This work is in our roadmap, but I can’t really say yet if it will happen in 3 or 6 months, but it will happen.
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Thanks for the replies.
Your plans for the future sound like a great solution, but I’d really like all of spine’s functionality now, so I’m going to check out other engines. Doubt I’ll find one as user friendly as Defold though.
Hope Defold get full Spine support sooner rather than later.
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Sorry to see you go. Good luck!