Hello,
We've hit a major snag in our game project and need some guidance on Spine limits, especially about attachment counts. Here's the deal:
- Our Setup: Unity mobile game with heavy Spine usage for the main character.
- The Character: Has tons of customizable parts (hair, clothes, etc.). Players can mix and match them freely. Need to show dozens of these characters on screen too.
- Current Stats:
Bones: 1133, Slots: 116, Anims: 280, Attachments: 10,393, Skins: 313. - The Problem: Bones/slots/anims seem fine, but our attachment count is exploding as we add more custom content. New skins aren't just texture swaps – they have unique meshes, attachments, and even animations, so artists have to build them in Spine. Can't do it at runtime easily.
- Worst Offenders: Adding one new hair + clothes combo adds 200 new attachments!
- The Scary Part: We've seen posts where Nate mentions keeping attachments around 50k for stability. At our current pace (adding 200 attachments per combo), we'll hit that limit after adding only 200 more combos
. That's maybe 2 years of content at best. That really puts a damper on our long-term plans.
We tested Spine Editor limits (i9-13900K CPU):
- 50k attachments? Runs smooth @ 60FPS.
- 80k? Still pretty good @ 60FPS.
- 100k? Starts dropping frames noticeably.
In Unity: Adding 10k attachments costs us 6MB more managed memory.
Our Big Fear: We want to keep expanding the character forever, but both the Spine Editor and Unity will eventually choke as the attachment count balloons.
Our Idea (Desperate Hack?):
Could we export each fully-made skin from Spine as its own separate file, then remove those skins from the main Spine project? Then, in Unity, load/unload these skin files on-demand.
Why this might suck:
- Pain for Artists: Animators would constantly need to export/import/backup skins. Super messy workflow.
- Code Nightmare: We'd have to dig deep into the Spine runtime source in Unity to make this loading work. Big changes!
Our Ask:
- Does this "split into skin files" idea sound technically possible? Any big gotchas?
- OR – Is there a better/smarter way to handle massive attachment counts from deep customization that we're missing?
- Any official advice or best practices for hitting Spine's limits with tons of unique skins?
Thanks!