I really, really would so much prefer Spriter and Spine to not implement themselves as drawing plugins. This forces the plugin to reimplement a bunch of Construct features and actually limits other creative features too. For example:
- you can't add a WebGL shader to just one part of a skeletal animation if the plugin draws the whole thing, but you can if it just controls sprite objects (e.g. make just the head flash red if hit, etc)
- you can't test for collisions with just a segment of a skeletal animation if the plugin draws the whole thing, but you can if it just controls sprite objects
- a plugin which draws the whole animation probably has to reinvent a whole asset management pipeline, but if it just controls sprites it leverages our project-wide in-editor spritesheeting engine
- Construct's support for containers allows you to treat composite objects as if they were one instance in the events
Personally I am convinced that these plugins should not use the drawing APIs and should simply act as controllers for sprites. This makes it much more flexible for the user, and avoids clunky reinventions of existing parts of Construct. I discussed this at length with a Spine developer a while ago and I thought they agreed; one of the outcomes of that discussion was the decision provide a custom import process so they can conveniently generate all the necessary sprites on import, so I filed this issue as a TODO for that work. Perhaps not all the Spine developers are aware of this approach.
We could add the drawing APIs they want, but one of the reasons we're holding off is because those features don't work in the canvas2d renderer. From the user's point of view, this will manifest as the plugin randomly not working on a small percentage of devices. I intend to make the C3 runtime the point where we unilaterally drop the canvas2d renderer, at which point we can go to town with these kinds of features. However even then it has the drawbacks listed above, and the C3 runtime is still some way off.
Rather than adding new drawing APIs, I would much rather add any extra APIs to allow them to act as controllers, and have a good workflow for importing and updating. That's why I filed the custom importers TODO issue. I am totally willing to co-operate with any developers who want to take this approach and refine the SDK to make it work well. I can't force them to, and they might make drawing plugins anyway, but I hope at least one of them take me up on this offer!
Hello,
Dev of Creature here. Creature is a 100% mesh based 2D deformation animation tool so mesh deformation ( and in particular, high performance per frame mesh deformation ) is key to really leverage its power.
We also do fancier skeletal mesh deformation beyond simple Linear Blend Skinning to achieve high quality curves/effects.
Ideally ( just like in almost any other game rendering engine ), we should be able to provide a list of points, indices and uvs and get the resulting mesh rendered out. This is a pretty standard API for any basic rendering pipeline. Rendering triangles as degenerate quads is not ideal even if the performance seems to be acceptable for some situations. Creature excels at high resolution meshes so again, performance is important.
I really want to support Construct 3 but a lot of the limitations regarding the renderer and what is provided to render simple meshes is lacking. Please let me know what I am missing here in order to achieve the level of visual fidelity on Construct 3 for the Creature animation tool.
Thanks