Best Approach for Converting To Spine Format

alic

Hey, this question is not necessarily for Nate, who I'm sure is really busy right now (amazing how much he gets done.) I'm posting just in case any other spine users have walked this path, and might have suggestions on the approach I should take.

I'm interested in converting my current game's animations (which are legion) from the format I'm using now over to Spine's format. If I don't end up doing this, I'm going to end up implementing a bunch of spine's features in this other animation editor I've been using, and then almost certainly using Spine for all future projects anyway.

So, would the best path be to build .json skeleton/animation files from my current animation data, and then import these into the editor? Or is there a better path I could take? Are there limitations in importing from .json which could be a problem, would it be better to try to convert directly to .spine format? Json seems easier since there's already the serializer in c# built into the runtime, which is the language I'm working in.

Thanks a lot for reading.

Nate

You won't be able to realistically convert to the .spine format. It is an undocumented and unversioned binary format not intended for anyone but the editor to read and write. It also contains project specific data that is unnecessary for using the animations.

The best thing to do is convert your data to Spine's JSON format. You can then import this into Spine, save a .spine project file, manipulate your data, and export the changed data as Spine JSON for use in the runtimes.

If you end up writing a script that converts this other tool's data to Spine JSON, that might be useful to share for other users. 🙂

alic

Thanks Nate! I've got the converter working great now... now to start thinking about converting the game code 🙂

Unfortunately I don't think the converter would be much help to others, as my old editor is a heavily modified version of an open source project called Demina... With features added on to the point that I said goodbye to compatibility with the main version a while ago. Otherwise I'd love to release it.