There is now one more place to put Spine animations to work. Stake Engine supports Spine through its PixiJS-based Web SDK. The integration uses our official spine-pixi-v8 runtime, so studios can bring existing Spine exports straight into a project.
Stake Engine provides the development tools and game infrastructure needed to build, test, and publish casino games. Studios can focus on how the game looks and plays rather than putting the surrounding platform together themselves.
Once a Spine asset has been added to the game's asset configuration, displaying it and playing an animation takes only two components:
We're excited to announce a major upgrade to spine-phaser-v4!
Spine game objects are now first-class citizens in Phaser, boosting rendering performance and unlocking highly requested features like slot objects. Phaser game objects can now be attached to Spine slots and clipped by Spine clipping attachments.
This upgrade builds on Phaser 4.2, which introduced the Mesh2D API, new stencil APIs, and support for a second tint color. We collaborated with Richard Davey and Benjamin Richards from the Phaser team, who helped us navigate the new APIs and validate the runtime integration.
Earlier versions of spine-phaser-v4 rendered through the separate renderer provided by spine-webgl. Phaser and Spine each managed their own WebGL rendering state. Whenever rendering switched between Phaser content and Spine content, Phaser had to finish its current batch, hand control to the Spine renderer, and then restore its state before continuing.
Those repeated handoffs interrupted batching and introduced extra state changes and rendering work, especially when Spine and Phaser game objects were interleaved in the display list.
The upgraded runtime instead renders Spine attachments through Phaser's Mesh2D API by default. Compatible Spine and Phaser game objects can now be submitted through the same rendering system and batched together. This avoids the old renderer boundary and makes Spine skeletons behave more like native Phaser content.
Add or remove interleaved Phaser and Spine pairs to see how each backend affects the number of draw calls:
"phaser" backend
–draw calls
"spine-webgl" backend
–draw calls
The previous spine-webgl backend remains available for projects that need it:
The attached object follows the slot's bone transform and appears at the correct place in the skeleton's draw order. It can be rendered before or after the slot attachment, follow attachment timelines, and be positioned locally with a Phaser container.
Thanks to Phaser 4.2's stencil APIs, Spine clipping attachments also clip attached Phaser game objects. This makes it easy to combine Spine animation with Phaser text, sprites, and other game objects.
The example below plays Spineboy's portal animation in slow motion. The Phaser logo is attached to the rear-foot slot and clipped by the portal's clipping attachment, whose boundary is shown in green.
The default Phaser backend supports all Spine features, including:
Mesh attachments and weighted meshes
Clipping attachments
Blend modes
Premultiplied-alpha and straight-alpha textures
Tint black
This upgrade is available in spine-phaser-v4 version 4.3.11 and requires Phaser 4.2.1 or newer. See the spine-phaser documentation for installation and API details, and explore the spine-phaser-v4 examples to see the renderer backends, slot objects, clipping, batching, and other features in action.
This Spine Tips tutorial shows how to rig a character to hold different items with one or both hands.
You’ll learn how to use IK and transform constraints to keep the character’s hands aligned with an item, how to animate equipping the item, and how to set up different follow behaviors: hands following an item or an item following a hand.
Download the project files from the video description to follow along, and share your feedback or suggestions for future topics on the Spine forum.
Check out our beginner friendly tutorial video covering the workflow for exporting skeleton data with Spine 4.3 and bringing it into Unity 6!
The video also goes over common errors new users may encounter during setup and import. If you're just starting out with Spine 4.3 and Unity integration, be sure to check it out.
Did you find this video useful? Join the discussion of this post on the Spine forum!
