I've got an engineer asking me about a problem he's having with optimizing performance on skins. The project I'm dealing with has a massive cast of characters that are divided into various Spine files by body type (ie male lean, male muscular). Each character is a skin within each file, and each skin is pointing to a corresponding subfolder so that when a character gets loaded into the game they're entirely contained within one atlas. The problem seems to be with linked meshes, of which there are many. When he loads a character that's dependent on the original meshes, it loads the dependent skin's atlas as well as the original skin's mesh data AND atlas. Basically the assets loaded are doubled, but half of them aren't needed or displayed, and obviously that's very inefficient. He's wondering if there's some way for me to stop this from happening in Spine, although my hunch is this is on his end. Any ideas? Surely linked meshes don't have to always force the loading of the original atlas when it's not needed.
As an aside, one solution he's suggested is for me to basically make the original skin a dummy skin that doesn't point to any images so that he can get the mesh data free from an associated atlas, but I don't think that will work for various reasons. I'll wind up with a skin full of broken file paths that will generate errors on export, which I believe will prevent him from loading the data into Unity. It will also make editing the original meshes impossible for me unless I load in and delete images every time a change is needed. This strikes me as a hacky solution that isn't how Spine Unity integration is supposed to work.