Hi community,
I use Spine since more than a year, and I am using Unity. I am not super happy with the state of things with the access to the information in Spine, and I'd like to hear your opinion. I will start with three critical situations that happened in the last week:
1) Spine 3.5 broke all my anims, as the setup pose was suddenly being mixed to the anim. I could manage to fix the anims by browsing and then ending up on this thread (Setup pose effecting skeleton when mixing interrupted); I had to trying all the alternative AnimationState.cs posted in there, and only one of them worked even though I had to try both of the amended AnimationState.cs files.
I would like to thank Pharan for providing this solution, but on the other hand I believe there is something wrong with the access to the information: for fixing this problem I had to browse forums for days, reading so many irrelevant comments, scouting for a potential answer, and all of this translates to time wasted.
2) Another example, is the Shaders topic: I'd like to try out normal maps, but every time I look for info, I get lost in multiple threads and it gets frustrating, as I am not a full time animator and I cannot be on top of every single topic, so that it becomes impossible to decode all the info in a reasonable amount of time.
3) Thirdly, the "Spawn hierarchy" feature of the Skeleton Utility. I have been striving to find the difference between the options "follow/override", and I have to guess I get it right from a few lines written here and there in the forums. Still, I am missing the info on what is the difference with using BoneFollower, rather than spawning one bone as follow. What are the pros and cons of each approach? In a similar way, what are the pros of using the SpriteAttacher instead of simply adding a Sprite as a child GameObject to a spawned BoneFollower?
Do you think that there could be a better way of handling knowledge transfer? Maybe a better experimental documentation, or an improved way to organize information? I have the feeling that Spine is handled by a bunch of really great guys, but I am outside of their "inner circle", so every time they are talking (on the forums), they throw a bunch of new and obvious concepts to them, but for me, as external developer that has to catch up, it is really hard to keep the pace and sort things out.
I think that you need something that in software development is usually referred as "product manager", which is a person that -as full time job- collects all the info in one place, prioritizes the issues, handle the communication with the users, provides timelines and keeps a record of what is working, official, experimental, upcoming and broken.
I feel that for being up to date with Spine, I have to do ALL of the following:
I hope this feedback will help improving the access to the information to regular people like me, as I think Spine is a fantastic product and you guys are doing a terrific job in helping out the community, but maybe things could work even better with some structure.
