Hello, I sincerely apologize that your post was missed. Could you take a screen recording of the issue to showcase where you're encountering the problem?
Also, what version of the Spine Editor are you currently using when encountering your issue?

It's not clear exactly what you have tried, but I can explain some things and maybe some hit the mark.

The normally scrollable area of the animation is from frame 0 to the highest frame in your animation. If you drag with the right mouse button, you can pan beyond the normally scrollable area. This should not be slow. You can pan this way even while dragging a key with the left mouse button.

If you drag the timeline position with the left mouse button and move the mouse past the edge of the view, Spine will scroll the timeline position based on wall time. This means the scrolling happens as fast as playback would. That is going to be slow if you zoomed far out, but this isn't intended for panning the timeline long amounts of time.

The limit for zooming out is limited, as you found. With a reasonably small window size, I can see about 3,000 frames in the dopesheet, graph, or audio view, which share the same limits. On a larger screen (2560 pixels wide) I can see 5,670 frames. We need a limit since we have a slider for the zoom level.

We don't have a way to increase the zoom limit, if only because there aren't many people doing such long animations and no one has mentioned it. What actions are you needing to do when zoomed out so far?

A workaround is that you can set the timeline FPS lower. 3,000 frames is 30 seconds at the default 30 timeline FPS. If the timeline FPS is set to 1, then the same 3,000 frames would represent 3,000 seconds (50 minutes). A lower timeline FPS may require you to hold shift to move keys between frames, making it harder to place keys from different timelines on the exact same frame.

spineappletree wrote

The thing is that this way we could never set a keyframe further than the last keyframe we currently have and have to deal with this zoom issue EVERY NEW KEYFRAME when animating from start to finish

You simply pan to the end of your keys and set new keys. Many animators use the Next Frame (R) hotkey to move the timeline position +1 frame.

spineappletree wrote

It's not very intuitive to need to drag to put a keyframe further away. I'm used to zoom out and place keyframes where I need to. I do that in other design- and animation tools, but can't do it in Spine because of a limitiation I don't get in the first place.

When you have a long animation, why would you want to see all the keys from frame zero to the end when setting keys? To do so you'd need to zoom out a lot. That looks like this (worse if we allowed more zoom out):

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Further, if you do set keys zoomed out so far, you can't see the keys well because they are so close together:

HTTPS をサポートしていないため、画像は非表示になっています。 | まだ表示する

spineappletree wrote

Why can't we zoom just 'endlessly'?

As mentioned, the zoom slider has a start and an end which are mapped to a minimum and maximum zoom. We could allow farther the zoom, but then the slider would no longer indicate the zoom level. While dragging the slider may not be terribly useful, looking at it to see the current zoom level can be.

The main reason however is simply because it hasn't been shown how it would be useful to zoom out farther than we currently allow. It is not useful for setting keys or the timeline position, as shown above. Navigation is the best argument in favor of a higher maximum zoom level. Not being able to zoom out to see the whole animation means panning is required to jump to a particular section. Maybe we can make the zoom out limit dynamic, so the maximum is always enough to see the entire animation.

spineappletree wrote

I'm sorry, but this doesn't solve things and make things worse.

Setting the timeline FPS is the only reasonable way to make zooming out so far usable for setting keys or timeline position. When each frame has a longer duration, you can still see keys on frames when zoomed way out.

spineappletree wrote

Sorry if this comes across as harsh. I like Spine very much, but I don't want to lie and want and need to work with Spine a lot. This is such a crucial part of the workflow and navigation. IMO the interface on zooming is just lacking the way it is build now IMO. After posting this here I found out what you wrote here; that we can drag past the last frame, but it's so unintuitive and just feels weird and as I wrote above, like being trapped in a cage, instead of feeling free, fast, in control and creative. I can't get used to it, it slows things down, it's a frustrating workflow and it's completely unnecesary IMO.

There any number of things about the Spine UI you could claim are unintuitive and you don't like how they work because you want or expect it to work some other way. Much about building UI is about defining limits for reasonable behavior. That is done all over the place in every UI.

For a productive discussion, focus on why the limits are bothering you. It is not helpful to point at other software or claim the limits are completely unnecessary. We won't make changes to Spine because of what other software does. The Spine UI is hand built from scratch, not using any sort of ready made UI toolkit, and we have reasons for every part of its behavior. Those reasons range from "unimportant, we just choose something to make it to work" to "absolutely crucial, we can provide a long list of reasons it is the way it is". In either case, for us to make improvements we need to understand the use cases, why the current behavior is causing pain, and how the new behavior improves that. Note when we do that, we are considering ALL the use cases of all Spine users, not just yours.

We are the UI experts that you trust to build you a great animation tool. If you don't trust us to do that, then you're probably using the wrong tool. It is unproductive to repeatedly criticize our decisions and classify them as completely unnecessary. It makes getting to the point and responding to your posts more time consuming. I understand that you are passionate about Spine and frustrated, but if you would focus on the problems you are having then it would be easier for us to help. What we need is basically "this is what I want to do, this is how I'm trying to do it, this is why I find it difficult".

spineappletree wrote

The same with limits in scaling of the viewport.

The viewport zoom is a lot more complex and the zoom behavior there works better when it knows which part of the zoom range is generally usable. A higher Bone scale setting gives more maximum zoom level in the viewport.

spineappletree wrote

[btw] Why do we need to log in on this forum each time we Submit a post, when we are already logged in?

It uses a cookie if you check "Remember me". It could be your browser is losing that cookie.

Yes, we are the ultimate authority for Spine. We have to make every decision and we have to implement every detail. You have absolutely no say in our decisions. No amount of criticism, emotional response, comparison with other software, or anything else will influence us except if you show "this is what I want to do, this is how I'm trying to do it, this is why I find it difficult". You claim we are arguing but in fact you are failing to show those three things and are instead way off in the weeds. You can dispense with your pity, criticism, reflections on how unfortunate the situation is, and everything else.

We don't need your suggestions for solutions to whatever problem you are having. We are the experts, we have the broadest knowledge, and we make decisions based on the considerations of all Spine users collectively. That is our job and no one else is as well placed to do it. If we needed to ask users what would be best for Spine, it would mean we aren't good at our job. Using our software means putting your faith in us to make the best decisions and implement the best solutions.

That said, if you want to suggest solutions, they are appreciated and welcome. We keep an open mind and listen carefully to all our users and incorporate their feedback along with all the other variables involved

you should know this firsthand. However, any suggestions you provide should be separate from "this is what I want to do, this is how I'm trying to do it, this is why I find it difficult". Mixing them muddies everything and is painful all around.

Responding to your posts is needlessly time consuming and emotionally exhausting. We put enormous effort into detailed and thorough responses. We've incorporated your feedback in the past and made significant changes to improve your experience with Spine. All that and still we are met with criticism about our process.