Hi Nate,
Trying my game with the latest changes using Libgdx runtime (and the SkeletonRenderer class), I saw a spike in my render calls (from 2 to 16 and counting).
I see that everytime I add another character which uses a skeleton it adds another render call.
Seeing at SkeletonRenderer, I guess the culprit is here:
public void draw (SpriteBatch batch, Skeleton skeleton) {
boolean premultipliedAlpha = this.premultipliedAlpha;
int srcFunc = premultipliedAlpha ? GL11.GL_ONE : GL11.GL_SRC_ALPHA;
batch.setBlendFunction(srcFunc, GL11.GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA);
Setting the blend function calls renderMesh(), which will flush the batch and.. well, you know the framework a lot more than me so you know what happens xD.
I know that I can subclass SkeletonRenderer and remove that part or skip it if I aren't using premultipliedAlpha (which will use the current blendfunction from the batch) which won't add more render calls, but other people would have the same problem so I think that a property to skip the set of the blending would be better.
Thanks in advance for your response.