Hi all,
I think spine for godot 4 should be converted to a gdextension.
Gdextension is a system which allows godot to import dll's at runtime. Spine is the perfect use case for it.
The biggest advantage will be ease of distribution, as we wouldn't have to download and use a completely separate version of godot. Instead, Spine will just be attached as a DLL.
Additionally, Esoteric Software won't have to constantly build and host the executables.
The conversion shouldn't be complex, either.
Spine for Godot as a GDEXTENSION
I think so too, and I'd love to do that, but it's currently impossible due to limitations of GDExtensions.
- No proper C# support, the resulting APIs are not good.
- Unknown status of platform support (mobile, and mostly web)
- Unexposed APIs we need (this is something I can try to fix by sending PRs)
As it stands, GDExtensions is not ready for prime time in our case. I've been in discussions with the core team about it, but we have not made any progress on it yet.
14 days later
Thanks for looking at it. I hope you get there soon, I know a lot of folks are holding out for this.