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After updating my Spine2D runtime some parts of my animations disappeared. I could use some help troubleshooting it as I'm out of ideas.

My spine files are whole scenes and contain several animation tracks. Most of them play on loop simultaneously, but one is played on demand. The other animation tracks are not stopped when the on-demand track is played, they all need to run at once.

The on-demand animation contains some bone movement and slot visibility toggling. The slots are toggled OFF at the start of the normal animation tracks.

In the on-demand animation track, the slots start toggled off and then are toggle on in order. The slot revealed by toggling is no longer showing in the runtime when the animation is played, although the rest of the animation is fine.

The textures for the slots that are missing are present in the atlas.

I tried swapping the slot toggling to alpha tints instead to see if that would fix it, and it did not help.

I've tried running the on-demand track in different track indices, it didn't help.

This setup worked perfectly in over a hundred scenes until now. What could be going wrong?

Here's some context, if it helps: https://i.imgur.com/rPN2ve1.jpg

The pink outlines on the triangle are the slots being toggled. They appear as the bear hits them with the hitting thing. The hitting thing animation works and the slots appear in the spine editor, but in the runtime only the hitting animation comes through.

I also just noticed I still had some slot visibility tracks in the on-demand animation. I removed them and it's still not working. There are no slot visibility tracks for the slots in question in the file now.

Hm, that sounds mysterious. I'm afraid without the actual skeleton it's going to be hard to debug this. Could you also share how you trigger the different animations on the different tracks?

I can share the scene if it helps.

I play some of the animation tracks on loop when the scene comes into view, then when the user interacts with it I play the animation track that is having the issue (and it plays once.)

I feel like I should try viewing it in something other than UE to see if it still has the problem. Any recommendations? It's exported as JSON and an atlas.

Cheers for that! The Skeleton Viewer plays the animation correctly, so there's some kind of problem with UE I guess.

I reverted to an older runtime and it's still happening. I can't think of what's changed but I'll triple check my UE project.

Here's how the animation is played:

void ASpineActor::PlayOnce(FString Animation, int32 Index)
{
   if (SpineSkeletonAnimation == nullptr) return;
   SpineSkeletonAnimation->SetAnimation(Index, Animation, false);
}

As it's playing other animations at the same time, I've tried placing it at index 0 and an index beyond the normal animation range. Neither track index made any difference.

Hm, your call into SetAnimation is fine. I'm afraid it's really hard to say anything beyond that without seeing the skeleton. You could share it with us via email at contact@esotericsoftware.com.

6 days later

I sent the file a few days ago, any chance you've been able to have a look? 🙂

We are sorry for the late reply! Chiming in for Mario since he is unfortunately held up longer than expected.

I tried to reproduce your issue with the latest spine-ue4 runtime but unfortunately it worked as expected, the on-demand animation played back normally.

I used the following code to start the animations, could you please check if this is what you described:

// Called when the game starts or when spawned
void ATestProblematicAssetPawn::BeginPlay()
{
   Super::BeginPlay();
   USpineSkeletonAnimationComponent* animation = FindComponentByClass<USpineSkeletonAnimationComponent>();
   animation->SetAnimation(0, FString("animation"), true);
   animation->SetAnimation(1, FString("animation2"), true);
   animation->SetAnimation(2, FString("animation3"), true);
}

// Called every frame
void ATestProblematicAssetPawn::Tick(float DeltaTime)
{
   Super::Tick(DeltaTime);
   USpineSkeletonAnimationComponent* animation = FindComponentByClass<USpineSkeletonAnimationComponent>();
   timePassed += DeltaTime;

   if (!startedAnimation && timePassed > 1.f)
   {
      animation->SetAnimation(3, FString("sentence"), false);
      startedAnimation = true;
   }
}

Could you perhaps test if the above code also reproduces your problem?
If it does, could you try to re-import the problematic assets in a different location and test if this works?

That's basically how I do it, yeah. I have just had a thought on something I can try though, as I try to play everything from "animation1" through to "animation30" just in case those tracks exist. Maybe that's interfering with it.