Scalability: how many skins & animations realistically fit into one skeleton?

sir_nomster

Greetings, dear Spine community

We are developing a 2D RPG game and after some conceptual try-outs we've figured that the most time-saving way to work with multiple characters is to have them all in one skeleton. That means we will have one skeleton with as skins as there are characters. And since some characters will have multiple angles..(front, back, side view) thats even more skins for one skeleton.

Some animations will be generic for many characters, some stay unique and it all comes down to naming conventions to not get lost.

Does anyone know if this is actually the intended way of using the system? Will the system be able to handle one skeleton with lets say 300 skins and even more animations?

Spinebot

Using a single skeleton with a large number of skins and animations is a common approach in Spine, especially for projects like 2D RPG games where characters share animations. There is no hard limit on the number of skins or animations you can have in a single skeleton, but performance considerations should be taken into account. Having a large number of skins, such as 300, is feasible, but it may lead to increased complexity in managing the project and potential performance issues, especially during editing. To manage this, you can use techniques like grouping skins by archetypes or using skin bones to manage different features like capes or hair. Additionally, you can create skins at runtime to reduce the number of skins in the editor. It's important to ensure that your naming conventions are clear to avoid confusion when dealing with a large number of assets.

Nate

There is no limit on the number of attachments, skins, animations, etc. The Spine editor can handle many tens of thousands of attachments, I'd say probably ~50k to be safe. However, large projects likely want to avoid defining skins in Spine by using a single set of attachments as "templates" that are replaced at runtime:
https://esotericsoftware.com/spine-runtime-skins#Creating-attachments

sir_nomster

Thanks a lot!