Texture’s scale is broken at runtime according to export set

Haruna Nishiwaki

I’m making action game using Spine + Unity.
We had exported atlas from assets removed white space (not check "strip white space") at until quite recently.
Now, We export atlas from assets include white space (and check "strip white space").
Then Texture's scale get broken when mesh deformed.
So, my character is broken like this:

left：in spine
right：in unity

My so cute character became monster… :sweat:
This monster looks like "Yuru-Chara" (The ugly cute characters is called "Yuru-Chara" in Japan), but I want to playing action games with cute girl… 😢

This is Spine’s specification? If this is bug, Will you fix this bug?
Or Tell me another solution.

Pharan

The recommended way is always to "strip whitespace"/"trim whitespace" BEFORE importing into Spine.

If you use Meshes, Meshes require that you never change the whitespace because it uses unstripped coordinates and can't reliably use anything else.
So if you export or pack the atlas from Spine and use whitespace stripping and whitespace changes/gets removed, this will happen.

This is not a bug, it's a technical and common limitation. If there's a bug, it's that there isn't a warning for users. (But I can understand that there are ways of implementing it where it can slow down if Spine has to check. @Nate, @Shiu, if this can't be done, maybe it should just be off by default and the whitespace stripping checkboxes should be categorized under an advanced heading and labeled with a scary WARNING symbol? I would do that either way.)

Anyway...
I don't know what to recommend as an easy fix.

You will likely need to do some work again. You need to re-export your character's individual body parts from Photoshop (or your drawing program) already whitespace-stripped and import them into Spine again. If you did any mesh animations, they will likely be deleted in the process.

If you need help doing this, let us know what tools you are using.

Liuk

Hi Pharan,
I'm developing a Cocos2DX mobile game, heavily based on Spine. It features 20+ fullscreen skeletons with which the user can interact, and also the UI is made with Spine.
Since I'm using so many skeletons, optimizing the exportations is a key point to ensure the best user experience in terms of storage and runtime memory usage and loading time.

Some of those skeletons have inner multiframe animations and in many frames there's a lot of whitespace. So using whitespace stripping in the Spine exportations could really help reducing the spritesheets size.

Will this technical limitation be fixed in future releases? if yes, is it scheduled already? I think it would help also other users who seek to push Spine runtime to the limit 😉

Pharan

It's a technical limitation for mesh systems. Not Spine specifically.

You have to pre-trim the whitespace yourself, in Photoshop or whatever program you are using.
The bundled Photoshop export script allows you to pre-trim the export and still have alignment in tact.
(you can find the script in your Spine program folder.)

BinaryCats

We are all in tears laughing :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: 😃 😃 😃 😃 😃 😃 😃 😃 😃 😃 😃 😃 😃 😃 😃 :talk: :talk: :talk: :talk: :talk: :talk:

Liuk

Thanks Pharan for the fast reply!
I didn't know about the bundled scripts (we're outsourcing the graphic design) so I'll try them asap.
But since we're releasing soon, and from your previous post I read that mesh animations will be lost, we'll probably go for another approach, maybe reducing the scale of the exported atlas... Thanks again!

Pharan

I think you can also trim partially by decreasing the canvas size of each source image individually, but (1) making sure the same amount is removed from all sides equally and (2) Not going any smaller than what area the mesh was using. You may want to back up your files before doing this. I've never tried it myself.