Circle colliders And Box Colliders

Ceyl

Hello,

I bought Spine few days ago and I am intensively testing it with unity. For a 2D pro game engine purpose, I would like to know if it is planned or even already possible to link 2d circle colliders or 2d box colliders (which are the most used colliders in many game engines) on animations directly into spine? And I'm don't speaking about linking it to a bone and follow this bone. I mean a solution similar to polygon bounding boxes editable in spine. I'm thinking about something like just editing a position and a size in spine and then it is translated in unity.

For example, for a brawler or a fight game running at 60fps it is really useful to have circle colliders hitboxes attached to weapons or characters and interpolate them between each frames in order to have "accurate" collisions. It's the way it is used in smash bros. for instance.

Cheers

27 Mar 2016, 10:42

UP, it's an important feature for a game engine, no one has an information about it?

Pharan

(1) There's a module called BoundingBoxFollower. It copies all your bounding box attachments and turns them into PolygonCollider2Ds, then watches for changes in the slot and switches whenever the slot attachment switches.

(2) For the collider to follow the bones, you need the BoneFollower component.
The SkeletonUtility hierarchy would have also been an option but it is currently not handling flips correctly in in 3.0. (No ETA on the fix yet but we're working on it.)

(3) Spatially accurate collisions here are also not the whole story. Since your animated skeleton would be driving colliders and relying on Unity to check for collisions, the skeleton would ideally have to be locked to the physics fixed timestep for it to be predictable/reliable. Otherwise it will be a nightmare to debug and you'll get annoying collision misses everywhere especially when your framerates aren't reliable on the device.
That involves changing SkeletonAnimation from using Update() to FixedUpdate() and passing Time.fixedDeltaTime to its Update(float) method.
https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spine-runtimes/blob/master/spine-unity/Assets/spine-unity/SkeletonAnimation.cs#L164

void FixedUpdate () {
     this.Update(Time.fixedDeltaTime);
}

mayhemking

I think he means something like this:

Ceyl

I was more talking about the possibility to have the choice for colliders I want to use. Here I can only use polygons, not boxes 2D or circles 2D. I have my hitbox system ready and working, but not compatible with Spine animations because I can't just simply use circle colliders.

For those who are interested, it is something like this : http://www.ssbwiki.com/Hitbox. As it is very specific and frame based game, having circles colliders for interpolation between frames is primordial.

It seems that it is more difficult to implement polygon colliders in such a tool as Spine and plugins to import those in runtime engines than circles or boxes.

So my question is more: is it planned to add those types of colliders into spine? If not, why not? (because it seems far less difficult than polygons).

Pharan

Sounds like a feature request. I'll mention it to Nate.
Some kind of abstract circle attachment.

Ceyl

Yes exactly, circle and simple box2D colliders attachement directly editable into spine. I think it can be useful for any games. Thx for the reply.

Pharan

He said it makes sense. "circle collision is easier".
Didn't mention when/if it's going to be a feature. Let's wait for him to reply to this post.

FelixW

Any progress on this?

Pharan

Nope, this is an editor feature and it hasn't been introduced in 3.3.
Still, let's wait for Nate.