Hi, there is rumor that after 4.0 officially released, spine team will be focusing on quality of life aspect of the editor. Here is one thing that sometimes brother me and I would like to share with you guys and see if it can be improved in the future.
I sometimes lost track of what I did in the spine editor and I end up don't know if I should commit the files to version control, and when I do I have no clue what to type in the comment area. There are many reasons for this to happen. Its not 100% spine editor's fault but its amplified by the current design of the editor.
The problem + a little background
I am an indie dev so unlike a normal animator, I do everything include arts, programming, design etc. Its very common for me to jump between different kinds of tasks like switching away from unity and fix an issue in spine and jump back to unity for testing. Even if I was just doing spine alone, I would from time to time open more than one spine projects for reference or other purpose. Sometime I may just want to confirm or test something. Occasionally, I may also spot something and make quick adjustment accordingly. Users like me in this situation, sometimes may not immediately commit the changes to the versioning control system because we may think more should be done later or half of the time we may just pressed Ctrl+S to save but forgot to actually commit the changes. The consequence is, I could end up with some modified spine files in the project folder I am not sure if I really did something or its just non-essential modifications.
So how does the current spine editor amplify the issue and how to fix it?
1.Spine editor is missing a history panel like in Adobe Photoshop.
The editor does support undo / redo but without a history panel it doesn't help in the situation I mentioned above. Imagine if the editor could show which animation (or base rig) modified, it could be a great help.
- Spine editor is recording too much noise (non-necessary changes).
For example, when I opened a spine project to test or confirm something, say select an animation without editing it, the editor would still mark my project dirty and this is very bad.
A recommended approach is to do it like Microsoft Visual Studio, separate the two kinds of data. In M$ VS, the core project is stored in .csproj and any user related states are stored in another file and it won't affect the output of the project. For example some non essential settings like which animation is selected should stored on a secondary file. That file could be different for each user can be ignored for version control because it won't affect the result of the spine project.
(Damn it, I have a feeling I mentioned this in the past already...maybe a year ago, Did I?)
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- Spine project file is encoded and I can't tell what I modified.
This one I actually don't quite understand the reason behind it.
If it is for performance reason, I would say we are loading and saving psd files from a few MB to a few hundreds MB everyday. Its really not a concern with a SSD. Its not worth to sacrifice the flexibility for little faster save/load time.
If it is for protecting the data (to prevent spine users to switch to other software?), people can still export the json file and convert to other format and use them in other software. I assume if the json file can be recovered into a full .spine project file, that means the json is quite complete except for some non-essential settings. Thus, it seems like its not the reason for saving the file in encoded format.
If it is for simplicity, you want to keep a single file...You can just use zip file like how andriod APK or Mac app files do and gain the benefits of both worlds.
On the other hand, because the file is encoded, It cause issues as I see in the forum. e.g. Not easy to do project merging. Not easy to do some automated validation / correction or even content insertion and finally unable to tell what is modified as the main topic in this thread.
I hope to see improvement on any one of the three points so that user could more easy to keep track of what they did and also help avoid facing mysterious modified project files. Thanks
