Would it be possible to add support for DragonBones spine animations? As a tool, it would be a valuable alternative to Spine, since it’s open source and free.
Skeleton data format spec:
http://dragonbones.github.io/doc/DBSkeletonDataFormatSpec_V2.4_en.xml
As far as I know there are no plans to add support for DragonBones, but things might change if many developers ask for it.
On the other hand I actually think this would be possible to do in pure Lua in Defold (and It would be quite fun to try and implement!)
Dragon Bones in last version has almost the same features (meshes, IK etc) like a Spine, but for free.
Would be great to have this format in defold engine.
I started looking into the format and it is very poorly documented. Sure, there’s existing implementations in Javascript and C# etc, but that is in no way a replacement for a well documented data format.
Spriter have nice documentation and lot of allready implentation + a json export format 
Absolutely should support DragonBones. Or someone should make a dragonbones json to spine json converter.
This seems to be the current spec: https://github.com/DragonBones/DragonBonesJS/blob/master/docs/DragonBones_4.5_data_format_zh.md
And on this issue here, it seems one guy managed to implement the format.
Not sure the devs are interested in this, but it is becoming a more adopted tool.
I remember in another Spine thread it was mentioned that Defold doesn’t use the Spine runtime directly, but rather converts it into its own internal format.
I would be great to have access or hooks into that format, so that translators could be written either externally (via a python script) or through lua directly in Defold.
What do you think? Is it doable?
That would be amazing!
Would like to add to this discussion that Before the full Spine support was implemented into Defold I wrote a Spine runtime in lua which worked very well with the functionality we wanted to use at that point (no mesh deformation though).
Same thing could easily be done with Dragonbone as well. Maybe give it a shot guys?
/A
I tried half a year ago to do the same with Dragon Bones, but at that time there wasn’t even any proper documentation of the format. Now with the documentation linked above it might become slightly easier, but the format is still far from trivial I’d say. I encourage the community to give it a try and maybe share your progress in a public GitHub repo to get some collaboration going.
Hello everyone, first post here!
I’ve been doing some tests and found this tool that converts DragonBone json to spine json.
Here is the process I’ve followed:
This is what I get on Defold, so I’m missing something and probably is related with steps 1 and 2.
This is the original on DragonBones:
Here is the converter tool: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamemaker/comments/54c0f7/dragonbones_free_open_source_2d_spine_animation/
If nobody finds a solution before I arrive home tonight I will give it another try and let’s see if I can get a tool that automatizes all this process.
Cheers!
I’ve just created an empty project in DragonBones, exported it following the same process and everything seems to be in place. Haven’t tried animation yet but looking good though! 
It also animates!
I will try to use it in something more complex but It looks really promising.
Cheers!
Amazing progress @JosCanPer!
It’s good to have in mind that we don’t support some features in Spine, such as (on the top of my head);
It might be one of those that results in the strange dragon example?
Might be, it is an example that comes with DB so I’m not sure how it is done.
I have tried with a different one and it simply works:
It has some minor issues but I would say it is completely usable. At least I will use it for my games.
With this spine file, I can’t see the images on the editor and only when the game is running:
If anyone of the Defold Team wants to check why this is happening, here are the files
demonanim.zip (2.0 MB)
Leaving that aside, it works surprisingly fine
Cool! Thank you for taking the time to research and share this!
