Issue regarding slot draw order with folders

shyeo

We’re experiencing a problem with slot draw order in our project. Whenever we create a new slot (for example, a “hand sleeve” skin/template), we have to manually adjust its draw order across hundreds of animations, which takes hours.
Now, with 4.2, we thought this issue will be finally solved with slot folders, but it isn't working as we thought it was supposed to work..

What's happening:

Folder’s draw order is already keyed in an animation, so all existing slots in the folder move together.
We place a newly created slot inside the slot folder.
Newly created slot stays in the same position during the animation while all old slots move together as before.

Is this the intended behavior, or is it a bug?
If it’s by design, is there an alternative workflow or workaround to avoid manually re-keying draw order in hundreds of animations every time we create a new slot?

Thank you.

Misaki

shyeo Sorry for the delay in responding. I looked into this issue and confirmed that it needs to be fixed, so I created an issue for improvement here:
EsotericSoftware/spine-editor887
We would greatly appreciate it if you could confirm whether the issue described in the issue ticket above is the same as your issue. If there are any other cases where the drawing order of the slots is not as expected, please let us know.

Spinebot

The behavior you're experiencing with slot folders in Spine 4.2 is by design. When you add a new slot to a folder, it doesn't automatically inherit the keyed draw order of the folder in existing animations. This means that the new slot will remain in its default position unless you manually adjust its draw order in each animation. Unfortunately, there isn't a built-in feature to automatically update the draw order for new slots across all animations.

As a workaround, you might consider using placeholder slots at the front or back of your draw order, which can be swapped with new slots as needed. This approach can help minimize the need for manual adjustments. Additionally, organizing your slots and animations in a way that reduces the frequency of such changes can also be beneficial.

ephka

I also have met with this problem myself, I always thought it would be nice if folders moved dynamically 😃
I'm uploading an example below of the draw order I looked up on the exported JSON file:

I am sure you guys have already thought about this and all is accounted for, but I'm still shooting my shot, maybe there could be a function in the draw order hierarchy tree, to checkmark a folder, so that when we keyframe it, the exported file would have not just "slot" offset, but "folder" offset, so even if we add a new slot to the folder, it would move dynamically in all of the keyframes since the offset is "folder"? and it would be togglable function, not workflow breaking change?

This would make large spine projects so much more manageable, allowing us to animate more than ordering layers in each animation for 200 animations per new attachment.

Also i have a question about the "placeholder" workflow, since we would be moving larger folders with 20+ placeholders lets say, would it be more performance heavy, or would it drastically increase .skel.bytes or .json file sizes?

Thank you in advance for your time to reply.

shyeo

Misaki All good! And yeah, this is exactly the same issue as described in the ticket, thank you!