Hi guys, new here.

First off, I'm really excited at the prospect of using Spine in my game. My current editor is very lacking and gives me nightmares when I think of all the animations left to create. I'm hoping that Spine can make it into a dream instead

For those interested, my game is Dawn of the Ronin - http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=211499174

After talking to people on twitter about Spine, my initial concerns are gone after finding out about the bounding boxes and events which will handle my hit detection and scripting needs. So, the last thing I need to find out is if it is possible to create a bone or some object in Spine that can act as a named marker, but isn't fixed or joined to anything else. These markers would then be used by my game engine for particle emitters, hit particles, things like that. The markers need to be able to be animated, but not fixed to a specific bone so that it is free to be moved anywhere without contraints, and to expose its position to my game engine.

As a note, I'll be using the XNA runtime, if that has any impact on my question. I have had a quick look through the documentation, and sure I saw it mentioned on the forum after a quick search, but I can't say I've looked that hard..

Hope that's clear, and would appreciate any thoughts or advice on how to go about doing this with Spine, even just to let me know that it is possible would be great!

Also, I found a page yesterday that showed the difference between versions of Spine, but I can't seem to find it again this morning? Hopefully I'm not being thick and someone can point me to it :p

Thanks in advance!
James

Shiu wrote

Welcome to Spine!

Game looks really great, looking forward to seeing more, I hope you manage to get it greenlit.

After talking to people on twitter about Spine, my initial concerns are gone after finding out about the bounding boxes and events which will handle my hit detection and scripting needs. So, the last thing I need to find out is if it is possible to create a bone or some object in Spine that can act as a named marker, but isn't fixed or joined to anything else. These markers would then be used by my game engine for particle emitters, hit particles, things like that. The markers need to be able to be animated, but not fixed to a specific bone so that it is free to be moved anywhere without contraints, and to expose its position to my game engine.

The top level bone is always the root bone, rarely do you put animation on this. For example I usually have the root bone and then a hip bone which I treat as the main bone of my character. You can just create multiple bones parented to the root bones and use some of these as particle emitters etc. These bones can be animated and can be moved anywhere. All bones can be accessed and manipulated at runtime.

Also, I found a page yesterday that showed the difference between versions of Spine, but I can't seem to find it again this morning? Hopefully I'm not being thick and someone can point me to it :p

You are probably referring to the changelog which can be found here

Thanks for the quick response!

The game's already greenlit thankfully, just on a mad-grind to get it finished ;-)

The explanation you gave sounds like it's simple enough to do what I was after, so that's very good news, sounds like it might not be as difficult to rip out my stuff and replace it with Spine afterall!

As for the differences, I should have mentioned that I meant the difference in features between the trial/paid versions. There was a chart available which I thought was on the purchase page, but I'll take another look around =)

Thanks again!

-edit-
Found it! Completely overlooked that little drop-down arrow!