Frame by Frame Posing in Spine

Starfishness

Hey y'all! I was thinking about setting a new pose every frame and using the step curve to essentially create a frame by frame animation. I know this would take longer than using tweening but I want to create a unique look for the game and I thought this would help achieve that.

My question is, are there any sort of performance issues that might arise from animating this way and implementing it into Godot?

Spinebot

Animating frame by frame using the step curve in Spine can indeed create a unique look for your game. In Godot, using the spine-godot runtime, you can manage updates efficiently by setting the Update Mode of your SpineSprite to Manual and controlling when updates occur. This can help mitigate performance issues by ensuring updates only happen when necessary. Additionally, consider the complexity of your skeletons and the number of bones being animated, as these factors can also impact performance.

Nate

There's not much performance hit just by having many keys. However, you don't need to do it that way. You can use interpolation between keys and still get a 12 frames per second (or any framerate) look at runtime. Instead of updating the animation with the time that is passed, you accumulate the time until you have enough for one "step", which is based on the framerate you want to emulate. Eg, see here:
https://esotericsoftware.com/forum/d/11025-changing-refresh-rate-at-runtime-to-mimic-no-interpolation/3

You can see this effect in Spine by unchecking Interpolated in the Playback view:
http://esotericsoftware.com/spine-playback#Interpolated
Set Timeline FPS in the Playback view to target a specific framerate.

Note this is about how the animation sees time pass, so it works with all skeletons, without you needing to set keys on every frame. So many keys is not recommended (unless you have better reasons) and would make editing the animation difficult.

Starfishness

Nate Ah okay! I'll try that out then! Thanks! :>