We are pleased to announce that we are partnering with Rive Inc. Developers will be able to design and animate in-game characters, UI elements, screen transitions and more in the Rive application and easily integrate them in their Defold games. The animations will run in real time with full runtime control and access to object hierarchies, bones and shapes.
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Wow! Never heard about Rive, but it looks amazing! 
Surprising news!
Yesterday I was looking for an animation tool when we were talking about short videos for Defold and now I have a perfect one! 
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and on development of a new high performance vector tessellation library suitable for use in game engines. The tessellation library will be released separately and ahead of the full integration which will be released later this year.
Would this be able to load SVG/other vector files perhaps for use as components / node types? Dynamic (from code) vector shape creation / modification at runtime?
The library is for tessellating the Rive app data, producing vertex/index buffers, thus making it easy for game engines to render.
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This is really cool. I can see Defold being the top tool for composting Rive animations with sound and interactions for web embed interactables / complex ads. I’ll try to think about how we could use those animations Rive enables in our games. Maybe we could have a gamejam where 90% of the assets must be made with Rive. 
Rive formats will support IK constraint targets like Spine at runtime? https://docs.rive.app/rive/constraints/ik-constraint
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Yes.
As I see it Rive can be a complete replacement for Spine. And it is free for individuals. And with a user friendly UI (I never really liked the UI in Spine).
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Great news, congrats.
I was wandering around the Rive documentation but couldn’t a find info about mesh deformation. Looks like it is not supporting. I guess it is just vector based. Any idea?
Edit-1: found this but very old: https://docs.rive.app/nima/meshes
Edit-2: I guess it has, nice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96Tn70enXmo
Edit-3: this video is old and I couldn’t drag drop psd file also there isn’t any import on editor.
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For many use cases yes. It does not support images (part of the point of vector work) which is a problem for some kinds of games, such as ones with very detailed painted assets - you cannot so easily replicate that with vector only. I will welcome the challenge of making a game only with Rive assets.
@selimanac Wait, it can import PSDs? 
So it is a full Spine replacement? I can’t seem to get the live version to do what’s in the video, is it older version?
I couldn’t import psd on the current live version(am I missing something!?) actually there isn’t import at all. Looks like video is old and there is no support for images. So it seems Rive is not a full Spine replacement.
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Seems like there are 2 versions and this is the version 2 without those features. I could only get vector formats like SVG to import.
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Great news. But I wish it was earlier as I paid for full Spine license two weeks ago 
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It’s fantastic!!
The Defold is always made me convinced and happy what I choose this engine among too many game engines. (like Unity, Unreal, Godot…) 
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Keep in mind that this is the partnership announcement. It will take several months before a production ready integration with Rive will be available to the community.
We’re doing it the right way this time, with Rive being the first extension which integrates with the engine on a component level.
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Will this be in the .go space only? One thing I’m missing in Defold is manually created timeline based animations for UI.
I asked some questions in their Discord and runtime IK and Raster graphics are on their roadmap. The video linked above is from the Flare version of Rive. Rive 2 is what will be supported in the future.
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We do not know yet. It will be part of the design work we do when we start that part of the implementation.
We will try to involve you as much as possible to make sure we focus on the right things.
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100% need to work as GO components and as GUI nodes. I would hope ways to reduce drawcalls for them would be possible and that not every Rive scene would necessarily add another draw call.
I imagine it could be expensive to tessellate lots of animations at once. Will be interesting to see what is possible on old hardware.
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Disappointing. I think this effort of core Defold dev team is bit of a waste of time. I hope this doesn’t sound rude(sorry if it is) but there are much more important details need to be improved onDefold if you want to be succeeded.
I disagree for a few of reasons:
- I truly believe that Rive will with its existing and upcoming features be a very interesting alternative to Spine.
- As part of this integration we will do the necessary architectural changes in the engine that will allow extension to define new component and data types and integrate these in the editor and the render pipeline.
- Rive will be the first extension to use these new features but it can also be used to move other tightly integrated systems to extensions (physics and Spine)
- The Defold dev team will take on another full time developer, funded as part of this partnership, to work on this integration. It will not impact any other planned work negatively.
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I think this is a really good thing. Extrapolating and creating those hook (especially the editor part) is no small task, and the fact that the work will be funded by Rive is key.
Personally I’m never too fond of big web apps. I find that when you start to really push them in a real production they tend not to scale well. Rive seems really well done though and I’m willing to see the results we can get.
Go Defold!
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