Upgrade to pro

Dennis_W

I already own Spine Essential and now after watching the new video on the mesh I understand what it is. So what will it cost me to get the pro version.
Thanks
Dennis

Nate

You can upgrade to Professional for the difference in price. See your download page for instructions. 🙂

mredig

Is this the policy for everyone, or just kickstarters?

Nate

Everyone. 🙂

mredig

In that case, how long is the current sale expected to last?

Nate

Not sure, probably until FFD, skinning, IK pinning and the runtimes are done.

mredig

MOAR QUESTIONS!

Estimates on when those should be finished? I know you have a pretty rapid release reputation, but I haven't been aware of your company long enough to get a good feel for what could be expected for the timing.

Nate

I detest giving estimates, so I am typically vague. It's the only smart way to do it, since estimates are generally worthless anyway and just set false expectations, even if sometimes you get lucky and guessed right. 🙂 That said, I hope to have skinning done in the editor in a week or two, and a couple weeks after that I would hope that most or all of the runtimes will be done.

mredig

Totally understood! I definitely won't hold you to it either!

This might be getting REALLY off topic, but when you say runtimes, do you just mean updating them with the new functionality that you're adding to the editor, or would you happen to also mean getting around to SpriteKit?

It might be obvious, but I am using SpriteKit and will be for the foreseeable future. I am aware of the third party runtime, but it doesn't handle how I would like it to (which may be for a very good reason that I have yet to uncover) or support OS X (and I'm too new at this to be able to be able to understand, much less correct the ARC issues it has). I've taken it upon myself to attempt one of my own, primarily out of morbid curiosity as to whether I can do it, but on the off chance it works well enough, to use it in actual projects. But if it's semi likely that there will be an official one that will support most (minus things like FFD that I believe SK won't support inherently) features relatively soon, it might not be worth completing.

mredig

I might also add that this is a particularly more difficult task when unable to export my own data to see how it affects the json! And while I don't know if I can afford it now, that's one of the reasons I'm more interested in the sale price and duration.

Nate

I mean updating the runtimes to support the new editor features. Adding support for new runtimes would be a separate effort.

Unfortunately SpriteKit can't support some of the most compelling Spine features (meshes, FFD, skinning). Is there a reason you don't choose to use a different game toolkit? While I have experience with many game toolkits, I'm still completely biased and suggesting my own technology, but libgdx is very powerful, has great IDE support (Java in Eclipse is pretty amazing, Xcode doesn't come close), has hotswap on the desktop (change code while the app is running!), and you develop a single codebase then deploy to iOS, Android, HTML5, Blackberry, OS X, Windows, and Linux. libgdx has a 2D scene graph like SpriteKit, cocos2d, etc called scene2d. libgdx contains my UI toolkit (called scene2d.ui) that Spine uses (Spine is written with libgdx).
http://libgdx.com

mredig

Quite honestly, I'm relatively new to the game dev scene, so I'd never even heard of libgdx before. Beyond that, SpriteKit is simply what I started with and will likely be what I use for the foreseeable future. I'm not against expanding in the future either, but for now I want to actually complete some projects!

However, libgdx looks very compelling and I will definitely be looking into it!

mredig

(Thanks for your time and responses!)

Nate

Aye, use whatever you are comfortable with, unless you are willing to sacrifice some time to learn something new. libgdx would be a good choice in that case, especially if you are at all familiar with Java. I am extremely productive with Java and libgdx, much more so than other technologies.