4.3-beta multithreaded sequence animation issue.

Dunull

Sequence animations produce rendering errors when multithreading is enabled and two or more identical characters in the scene play the same sequence animation.

Spine version: 4.3.39-beta
spine-unity runtime: 4.3-beta (latest)
Unity version: 6000.2

Harald

Dunull Sorry to hear you're encountering issues.

By "sequence animation" do you mean a Region Attachment (not a Mesh Attachment) with sequence enabled as in this documentation seciton? Or something else?

To be sure: Does the issue not occur if under Spine Preferences (or at the skeleton components) you disable both Threaded Animation and Threaded Mesh Generation?

In general it would be necessary to send us a minimal Unity reproduction project as Spinebot wrote above so that we can reproduce the issue. BTW: you only need to provide the following out of the list above:

This forum thread URL for context
Steps to reproduce the issue

Harald

Dunull produce rendering errors

I forgot to ask earlier: What exactly do the "rendering errors" look like? Could you share a screenshot, or describe it to us? If you can send a reproduction project, that would of course make screenshots obsolete.

Spinebot

I understand you're experiencing rendering issues with sequence animations in the 4.3-beta version when multithreading is enabled and multiple identical characters play the same sequence animation.

This appears to be a bug in the current beta version. To help get this resolved, I recommend sending a minimal Unity reproduction project to contact@esotericsoftware.com. In your email, please include:

Your Spine version (4.3.39-beta)
Your spine-unity runtime version (4.3-beta latest)
Unity version (6000.2)
Steps to reproduce the issue
This forum thread or issue description for context

The development team will be able to investigate and fix the issue more quickly with a reproduction project that demonstrates the problem.

In the meantime, if you need to continue working, you could try:

Temporarily disabling multithreading to see if that resolves the rendering errors
Using an earlier stable version (4.2) if your project allows it and you haven't saved with 4.3-beta features

Since you're using a beta version, bugs like this are expected to be fixed quickly once reported with reproduction steps.

Dunull

Harald Sorry, English is not my native language. I didn't explain that well. The issue is an occasional incorrect frame appears in the sprite animation, although the frames are not shuffled (the order is correct). The problem vanishes when Threaded Mesh Generation is disabled.

Dunull

Yes, I created a minimal reproducible project. When the second sequence-frame animation object is activated after the game starts, the sequence-frame order of all animations becomes scrambled.

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Nevak

Hi! Just want to add that we are experiencing the same issue after uploading to 4.3 beta (other than this it seems to work very well, nice job!)

A few more details:

Happens only when more than 1 character is playing the sequence AND "Threaded Animation - Use Threading" is enabled in the SkeletonAnimator components.
Seems to stop happening when any of these two conditions are not met.
The issue also seems to stop if I set "Use Threading" to disabled and then back to enabled.
Seems to happen even with Time.TimeScale is set to 0 in the editor (see the videos)

I cannot attach a simple project at the moment, but here are a couple of videos showing the issue (notice the flaming heads flickering due to buggy UV's in the lower triangle of the quad)

Dunull

Another issue: when Threaded Animation is enabled, “unscaledTime” stops working and the animation stays frozen. (Time.timeScale = 0f)

Harald

Dunull Another issue: when Threaded Animation is enabled, “unscaledTime” stops working and the animation stays frozen. (Time.timeScale = 0f)

Good catch, thanks for reporting!
We've created an issue ticket here:
EsotericSoftware/spine-runtimes2987
This one should at least be quicker to resolve than the Sequence issue above (for which we will have to discuss with the whole team whether we perform some design architecture changes to the general API).

Harald

@Dunull and @Nevak Very sorry for the troubles and thanks for reporting! Thanks very much @Dunull for the reproduction project, much appreciated!

You've indeed discovered a bug with this, it's a basic design issue (instance vs shared data) which was not problematic until processed on multiple different threads. We've created an issue ticket here for you to subscribe:
EsotericSoftware/spine-runtimes2986

Until the issue is resolved, we suggest that you disable Advanced - Threaded Mesh Generation - Use Threading on the SkeletonRenderer component.

Happens only when more than 1 character is playing the sequence AND "Threaded Animation - Use Threading" is enabled in the SkeletonAnimator components.

@Nevak Are you sure it's the threaded animation on the SkeletonAnimation component and not threaded mesh generation on the SkeletonRenderer component?

Nevak

Harald Thanks a lot for the quick reply!

Harald @Nevak Are you sure it's the threaded animation on the SkeletonAnimation component and not threaded mesh generation on the SkeletonRenderer component?

It seems like it, I would think intuitively that it's related to the mesh generation threading setting, but I just double checked and it seems to be affected only by the threading setting in the SkeletonAnimator component.

I took another video doing this test:

At first I disable multithreaded mesh generation for all skeletons, and the issue still occurs.
Then I re-enable multithreaded mesh generation and disable multithreaded SkeletonAnimator update and the issue disappears.
Finally I re-enable multithreaded SkeletonAnimator update and the issue doesn't come back.

Let me know if you need more info or repro steps

Thanks!

Harald

Nevak It seems like it, I would think intuitively that it's related to the mesh generation threading setting, but I just double checked and it seems to be affected only by the threading setting in the SkeletonAnimator component.

Ok, thanks a lot for double-checking @Nevak!

Harald

The issue of Unscaled Time has just been fixed, a new spine-unity 4.3-beta unitypackage is available for download:
https://esotericsoftware.com/spine-unity-download#spine-unity-4.3-beta
Thanks again for reporting @Dunull.

We will post here again as soon as we have updates regarding the Sequence issue.