- Edited
Importing flash is important for solo/indie devs
Spine works best when people develop animations in it's own editor. This I agree with. Unfortunately, this creates a problem for independent developers.
Let's say I want to create several animations for an app, and I want to hire an artist/animator to do it. The pool of artists I have to choose from is drastically reduced because I can't hire someone skilled with flash.
I could ask them to learn Spine, and maybe a few would be willing to, but the number of artists I have to choose from is still limited.
I can see asking an artist I've worked with over several jobs to take the time to learn Spine, but many individual developers may not have access to those artists on a regular basis.
Is there any chance the developers of Spine could reconsider developing a feature for basic animation imports from Flash?
I should note that these guys http://www.webtech.co.jp/eng/spritestudio/ allow for Flash import, but the $900 price tag is awful. They have their importer on GitHub https://github.com/SpriteStudio/FlashToSS/tree/master/jsfl so it might be worth a look if the devs are interested.
Even if such import is done, you'll have a lot of restrictions. 30% good animation in Flash using skew - they do not support the spine. Spine look awesome with a mesh animation - Flash does not support it. Etc.
Every feature in Spine wouldn't be supported, but the trade-off is acceptable for indie devs. Larger companies that can afford a full time artist can spend the time using mesh animation and other features.
By allowing Flash animation imports, simple animations can be made at a much lower cost.
I doubt any artists would reject learning spine (providing you supplied them with a professional licence), all of the artists I have shown spine to have been really impressed, and wanted a hands on. nowadays most (game) artists have experience with 3D art, and spine animation isn't too dissimilar to 'learning' should be intuitive to them.
what would you hope to gain by using flash + spine? why not just use flash?
My understanding is Flash is not good for performance, compared to spine. And then Spine is more easily edited once imported, as well as more accessible in code (show/hide images, etc).
2 months later
I seriously doubt that this is something we would be able to maintain.
A better option would be to export flash data and then use a third party flash to JSON converter (not something we will be doing). This JSON file could then be imported into Spine.
We simply don't have the manpower to maintain a Flash importer. You also have to consider the fact that some of the animation done in Flash would be impossible to import into Spine. Flash is vector based while Spine is bitmap based and this is a very big difference.
4 years later
May I touch the corpse?
I know there's some troubles on it, Adobe is giving a fuck about it's Flash/Animate platform, and working on it nowdays feels wrong as we always stumble on many many many problems on the way. I think there's even more reasons to not support flash, but I cant remember it right now.
The thing is, Flash is very good for prototyping. That's a good lost cause that Adobe suits will do nothing to help, but, where may you do shitty sketches with your tablet, straight on the software, and go on the flow, animating as it goes?
I do believe there's room for a very better animation software to exist. Something that would allow drawing, sketching, messing around, and, of course, decent structured animation projects with good features, as Spine does.
For the difference between Flash/Vector and Spine/Bitmaps, there's an excellent plugin that exports Flash/Animate content to Unity. It works very very nice, creating a sprite-atlas on .png, from the vector art-data. I love it.
But there's some issues: the work Flash content does on web is poor on today's standards, the plugin I've mentioned does not support changing skins yet (maybe it does today, idk), and the bone tools of flash creeps me out. Also, the Adobe's prices creeps me out.
Just some thoughts.