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multiple animations and draw order

utkiupe

so we are working on a character for a top down view game
this character can run in 8 directions, and we have chosen to separate the head animation and body animation

our goal is to have more head orientation than the body (16 orientations) and be able to have the character looking in a different direction than where the body is heading...
So we have 2 tracks, one for the body animations, and one for the head animations...

of course, we have to sep up a draw order when rotating the character, having the eyes, ears, and hairs being behind or in front of the face.
same thing goes for the body

but here is the thing: draw order seems absolute.
Even if the draw order on the head animations try to set up only the head elements and the body animations handle the body elements, there is always one that erases what the other is setting up. Meaning that if I have my body animation looping, the key on draw order will setup what the key in the head animation set before.

Is there a solution?

utkiupe

Erika

One solution would be to duplicate the slots that you need to have at a different draw order and separate the pieces that need to be in the front fron the ones that usually will stay behind. This means activating those slots only on need and having a little more to activate/deactivate, but it is also the kind of control that would allow you to set precisely the order things should be displayed.

I agree, the fact that the draw order has a unique key that overwrites the others can be a bit of a pain sometimes (;

utkiupe

this is what we are doing currently
it can be hard to maintain though
luckily our character design is simple, but with more complex characters it can be really annoying...

maybe it's something that something that can be changed in future version of spine : instead of being absolute each time you key the draw order, we can have something more relative to only the slots we are moving
I am sure though this has a lot of issues but I can't really figure out what they are now 🙂

Nate

It would get tricky to combine multiple draw order changes

there isn't a good way to resolve ambiguities. Eg, you move slot A in the draw order list, great. In another animation you move slot B to the same draw order position. When we combine the two animations, is A above or below B? There are other, similar situations that would be problematic.

utkiupe

maybe something like draw order groups?
and when keying in a group, it does not affect the other one.

Nate

Yep, that would be an interesting solution!