Save .spine-file in JSON or XML for easier versioning?

nicmar

Hey!
I love spine, and it would make my life so much easier if all the data was saved in a git-friendly format, so that if I add an animation, a chunk of data in JSON or XML-format was added, and I could easily see that in the git history.

Now I just have a bunch of binary updates, and it's really hard to see what's going on, and practically impossible to take a feature from a new commit, and apply it to an old one.

Is this something you have thought about? I know Unity added this way back and it's great to be able to see what actually changed.

Thanks a lot for a great product that will come more and more to use as we add creatures to Space Chef. 🙂

nicmar

Nate

Spine's internal versioning is complicated and the binary format is essential for that to work as it needs to. You could version JSON exports, just note to use that data with a newer version of Spine you'd need to import into the same version that exported it, save a Spine project, then open the project in the newer version of Spine (this can be done via the CLI). However, I don't think diffs would be terribly readable for any except the simplest changes. Also merging would also be prone to breaking the data.

nicmar

Ok that’s unfortunate, it’s just when I see the nice tree structure and imagine everything as objects and coordinates it just feels like it would be possible.

<Animation>
<name>walk</name>
...etc would make it easy to see an animation was added and so on.

But I guess you know what you’re talking about, it was worth a shot asking. 🙂 Good idea with the json export in the repo, it usually goes straight into the game folder.

Thanks 🙂