Any ideas on what a release timeline on v3 is looking like with the launcher update / other work?

Sorry you feel that way newbacknew.

All the best.

Nate wrote

Adobe certainly has a lot of manpower, but they won't fix your bugs and release an update the same day it was reported or even write down your feature requests.

Not guaranteed, but a heck of a lot more manpower than a two man team. This is also why I firmly believe in source licensing. We can do the work ourselves if it's not in the pipe.

Nate wrote

The main reason we don't license the source is the risk it puts on our business. This is separate from my opinion that getting involved with setting up and forking a complex tool is not usually necessary.

We disagree based on our past experiences, but that's cool.

We don't have to get into a debate about it, but I humbly disagree.

The difference is that Adobe has a massive dev team working closely with the huge audience that uses it, so the amount of new features and improvement is at a pace that's in a different world than what a team of one or two can accomplish. So the chances that a feature that's needed by the community is much higher.

Like I said, I hear you that working in another person's live source code is hard, but we're an experienced team that's worked on and contributed back to many different game engines and tools that have source licenses. We know it's hard - it's absolutely a pain to build inside of someone else's codebase, but increasing an artist's workflow by 5% or even 1% over the lifecycle of the product / company is totally worth it. We disagree on that value, and that's ok. Just a bummer for us that your opinion that we wouldn't want to be working on the editor prevents us from working to add that value to our team and to Spine.

Thanks for the suggestion for a hacked solution for the runtime - it's the approach we were planning on taking if we end up landing on Spine. It is very hacked on and doesn't give the artist the ability to iterate on their work in the editor (as you mentioned). Honestly it makes me just want to build another layer inside of Unity that does and visualizes that work, forcing the artist into a clunky workflow if they want to see their work, and decreases their ability to be awesome. That sucks.

Looking forward to v3 and will be looking into alternatives in the meantime. Thanks for the help.

I hear you and respect your take. That being said, paying for Photoshop also comes with guaranteed official corporate support and a massive development team, so hopefully you understand why it feels quite different to us (especially while some of the features we'd like to add to our pipeline aren't prioritized right now). It's always complex working in a live codebase, but it's something that would unblock us.

If you're firm on your stance there (which is sounds like you are), we may just have to wait until v3 comes out and look at other tools / roll our own solution if it doesn't have the features we need.

Appreciate the replies. Cheers.

Thanks again for the responses!

Pharan wrote

Oh, so you're about to scale up your studio and will need to invest time in like... R&D stuff for everything? So you have to decide if Spine is the right tool to use. Sounds fair.

Yup, that's exactly right

Nate wrote

Sorry you didn't get a response. I don't see any messages from your email address?

Ah, I probably sent the request via my work email address and created the forum account on my personal. I'll send another request after posting this in case there's anything to take offline to continue the conversation.

Appreciate the links to the update history - that definitely helps me understand a little bit better the plan on record and history of releases. I totally understand cranking on something for years, especially a small team. Burnout is totally real, especially when you have a live userbase of developers using your toolset. I genuinely hope it's not causing you guys too much stress. Even labors of love take a toll.

Nate wrote

There is Trello, though I'm not super happy with it. It tends to be a jumbled mess, especially with so many "ideas" and features that we want to implement, but not in the near future. We plan to change to something else, or at the very least to reorganize the Trello board.

Yeah, we've used Trello in the past, although in general I've found Pivotal Tracker (https://www.pivotaltracker.com/) and Asana (http://asana.com/) to be better, more comfortable fits. Trello has some clean visual simplicity, but I tend to like Pivotal Tracker for teams that are on active sprint development (when you near burn down charts to reaching milestones) and Asana to be excellent when you want to break work into projects and just maintain a priority list (a bit more minimal, but functional). Just some suggestions to look into if you're interested.

Nate wrote

I do all of the editor coding, with Shiu doing art. I also do the runtimes along with Mitch and others. Keeping a small team ensures Spine's quality is high and I I hope this shows.

Totally get it, and I would do the same thing in your shoes. I definitely believe in small, focused teams. My main question was making sure to have confidence in the long term of Spine and updates for external changes (like a new engine update and requiring runtime updates, etc) and improved workflow.

Nate wrote

This isn't something we have done or have plans for. The source is our entire business and distributing it, even under license, puts us at huge risk. We do offer a source code escrow option, which would provide the source in the event that we go bankrupt or no longer exist. In that case you would be limited to using the source only for your own use.

I totally get it, I really do. I understand the reluctance, and similarly, I need to make sure to keep my business safe as well and clearly understand what my engineers can do to augment our artist's pipeline, especially with some features that we know we need and that we could write effectively (it's possible lots of these are supported in 3.0). Any external dependency where we don't have the ability to fix the issues / needs that come up for our team introduces a large risk for us too. :/

There are lots of very successful companies, big and small, that license their source code to other companies safely, especially game engines (Valve's Source, Unreal, Unity, Crytek, Cocos2D, etc). It's definitely something we value very highly and is often a deciding factor for using external tech. I won't push you to do something you don't want to do, but would urge you to consider it.

That all in mind - is there any expected timeline for the 3.0 release? In the case that we need to wait for that to really evaluate whether a closed source version of Spine is a good fit, it would be helpful to get an idea of when that's coming.

Again, appreciate the responses all!

Thanks for the detailed response, Pharan. I appreciate it!

You're definitely right that one thing I wanted clarity on is the long term reliability / keeping up with runtime updates from Esoteric on Spine, and it's great to hear that you've had positive experiences in the past with Nate and the tool. That's really good to hear.

I would doubt that Nate (or anyone else that works at Esoteric?) would turn into an asshole and intentionally screw over users of the tool. Even if so, the loss we would have there is less about the $₃₀₀ spent on the tool and more the investment of establishing a studio's workflow and content around that tool.

Also good to hear that there's an update coming soon. Is there any visibility on the status of that / the roadmap of features to be included there?

My experience with the tool thus far has been evaluating it as a fundamental part of our art pipeline as we scale up our studio. I've worked with variants of this 2D deformation tech for quite a while and I have multiple friends at other companies that have used the tool and weighed in with their opinions as well, which have mostly been positive.

The information I'm mainly looking for isn't about concerns that the company would screw over its users intentionally, but more of what the current scale of the team and its velocity towards improving the project / supporting it look like. Many of these tools are small teams that need to focus on a small set of features / improvements and it often means that official support gets (unfortunately) dropped by the wayside. Not anything against the teams, but it does make committing to a tool more concerning if things don't work out.

As an example, one of the things that we're going to need to achieve the visual style of the game we're working on is changing out a mesh region while preserving the FFD, which has been on the backlog for over a year. Totally understand that it can get de-prioritized for other work (like a rewrite), but was trying to get an understanding of what reasonable expectations for turn around updates to the editor / runtime, feature requests and bug fixes looks like (very dependent on the size of the team).

My strongest preference would be to not be a burden on the Esoteric team for features that our team definitely needs - I would love to just be able to license access to the editor's source so we can make the changes that aren't a high priority on the current backlog. We're a team of very experienced game developers and could be updating the editor to our needs and contributing back to the original repo to improve the product for all of us.

Spine clearly looks like a solid product of passion for the Esoteric team. I just want to make sure that if our studio commits to using it we're empowered to make the fixes / updates to our workflow to not slow us down.

Hope that helps clarify the specifics of what I was curious about.

I had a question for the people on this forum about the official support / progress through the backlog of bugs. Our studio is full of experienced game developers and we love the tool in general, but wanted to get some clarity / conviction on the long term life and support of Spine before we commit to it as our animation pipeline.

So for the people who have been using Spine / have been active on the forum for a while:

• How is the support? I've tried to reach out via the contact link on the support page and not received anything back.
• Is Spine still in active development? This forum post makes me a little concerned, but might mean things are getting better? http://esotericsoftware.com/forum/Are-you-death-5170?p=24262#p24262
• How quickly is the backlog getting addressed? Is there a roadmap of expected feature delivery anywhere? This feature is one that's mentioned in the docs that we particularly need: https://trello.com/c/ljyJfNVt/63-way-to-change-the-region-for-a-mesh-so-ffd-can-be-reused
• How many members of the dev team are there cranking through issues? Nate seems to be the main person making changes - are there any others? https://trello.com/b/frGlgsF7/spine-editor
• Is there any availability for a source license of the editor? If we had the capability to change / improve the tool as we need for our pipeline we would be a lot more confident in its long term viability for us.

Lots of questions, but answers / relevant thoughts from anyone would be much appreciated!