Hi All,

Is there a best practice for caching spine atlas and skeleton data in Cocos2d-x? There's been a few posts on the subject (in which people decided to write their own caching maps), but I figure with things changing so quickly all the time I should ask before diving in myself.

Here's a few of the posts I've found related to the subject:
http://discuss.cocos2d-x.org/t/about-spine-data-cache/27016
Cocos2d-x - Batch all Skeletons / Sprites from one atlas
Skeleton Animation performance

Thanks!

Went ahead and implemented what seems correct.. please let me know if I've missed something:

    

static unordered_map<string, spSkeletonData*> skeletonDataMap;
static vector<spAtlas*> atlases;

SkeletonAnimation* createWithFile (const std::string& skeletonDataFile, const std::string& atlasFile, float scale) {
    

spSkeletonData* skeletonData = NULL;
auto iterator = skeletonDataMap.find( skeletonDataFile );
// TODO - optimize - some skeletons use the same atlas - we could map the atlases too
if( iterator == skeletonDataMap.end() )
{
    spAtlas* _atlas = spAtlas_createFromFile(atlasFile.c_str(), 0);
    CCASSERT(_atlas, "Error reading atlas file.");
    
    spSkeletonJson* json = spSkeletonJson_create(_atlas);
    json->scale = scale;
    skeletonData = spSkeletonJson_readSkeletonDataFile(json, skeletonDataFile.c_str());
    CCASSERT(skeletonData, json->error ? json->error : "Error reading skeleton data file.");
    spSkeletonJson_dispose(json);
    
    skeletonDataMap.insert({skeletonDataFile,skeletonData});
    atlases.push_back(_atlas);
    
}
else
    skeletonData = iterator->second;

SkeletonAnimation* node = new SkeletonAnimation(skeletonData, false);
node->autorelease();
return node;
}

And then I cleanup the cache in between stage loads:

void cleanupCache()
{
    for ( auto it = skeletonDataMap.begin(); it != skeletonDataMap.end(); ++it )
    {
        spSkeletonData_dispose( it->second );
    }
    

for( auto atlas : atlases )
    spAtlas_dispose(atlas);

skeletonDataMap.clear();
atlases.clear();
}

Cool, thanks for reviewing my code Pharan.
That's pretty much how I'm using it - caching during the loading screen.