Nate wrote

He's right that Spine doesn't have colliders. You can get a bone position and do hit detection or I imagine place a collider (though I'm not too familiar with Unity colliders). Spine will have bounding boxes (a Kickstarter goal) which lets you create areas for hit detection. It would make sense for bounding boxes to be colliders in the Unity runtime.

I think static colliders would be easy enough to just add in Unity to an existing Transform (assuming each Spine bone equates to a Transform in Unity). The trickier part sounds like dynamic colliders where the colliders may turn on/off or even change shape as part of the animation (like checking collision for a melee weapon swing). So, would there be any easy way to implement something like a melee weapon swing collision using Spine? Is there anything like an event callback system in Spine? If it could call some arbitrary function at certain frames in the animation that would work fine for turning colliders on/off in Unity.

Thanks a lot! That's some great info!

I will say that this is definitely making me reconsider Spine.

I'm also trying to ask the same questions at the Smooth Moves forum to see if they can list differences as well.

Hi!

I've been researching 2D skeletal animation systems for use in the Unity game engine. I'm just about ready to make a purchase and it's between Smooth Moves and Spine. At the moment I'm leaning toward Smooth Moves mainly because it's integrated so well into the Unity editor and no external tool is required. It also generates standard Unity animations, which is nice.

But before I make my decision, I thought I'd come here and let someone convince me of why I should give Spine a shot instead. I realize that Spine is more engine-agnostic, but I plan to be developing exclusively in Unity, so that's not a selling point to me. So, are there some things that are unique to Spine or that Spine does better than Smooth Moves?

Thanks!

Clarence Simpson
Jarcas Studios