In late 2020, Apple introduced their first machines sporting Apple Silicon, the brand name for their custom ARM CPUs. Spine has been running on Apple Silicon hardware through Rosetta 2, a pretty impressive piece of software that translates x86 instructions to ARM instructions. This allows Spine to run unmodified on Apple Silicon, despite being built for Intel-based Macs.
Today we're happy to announce native Apple Silicon support for Spine! The native Apple Silicon version starts up faster and provides improved performance compared to running Spine via Rosetta 2. You can download the Apple Silicon launcher from your Spine license page.
With the new launcher, Spine versions from 4.0 onward run natively on Apple Silicon. Older versions still have to go through Rosetta 2, as they do not share the revamped architecture of our 4.x line of Spine. Of course you can still run these old versions through the new launcher.
Share your experience with Spine running natively on Apple Silicon on the forum.
We released our spine-godot runtimes almost 2 months ago. Since then, we've further improved the runtime based on your feedback and bug reports. Eventually, one unfortunate issue cropped up: Godot plugins and modules may fight over a generic file extension like .json when trying to import it.
This leads to issues when spine-godot is combined with other plugins or modules, like Dialogic. When both spine-godot and Dialogic are loaded into the Godot editor, one of them will be chosen by Godot to import all .json files, preventing the other from importing files with that file extension.
Godot 4.0 has introduced JSON as resource files that helps any new plugins to co-exist happily. However, since we continue to support Godot 3.5 for the foreseeable future, we have to introduce a breaking change.
Starting today, spine-godot will no longer be able to import JSON skeleton files with the .json extension. Instead, JSON skeleton files must use the extension .spine-json. This change will apply if you download the latest pre-built Godot editor from us, or if you rebuild your local Godot editor from the latest spine-godot sources. This applies to both the 4.1 and 4.2-beta branches in the spine-runtimes repository.
If you have an existing Godot project using spine-godot and want to update to the latest version of spine-godot, we are here to help. Here's how you can do that without issues:
Backup your existing project.
Make sure you have the latest Python installed and can run it on the command line by adding its bin/ folder to your PATH environment variable (only needed on Windows).
Download our Python script that will convert your Godot project from using .json skeleton files to .spine-json files.
Run the script on the command line, providing it with the full path to your Godot project directory, e.g. python convert.py c:\myproject
The script will then:
Rename all .json skeleton files to .spine-json and delete the .json.import files. The .import files will be recreated next time you open the project in Godot.
Fix the paths to all external resources of type SpineSkeletonFileResource in all your project's .tscn and .tres files.
Once the script has converted your project, you can open it with the latest Godot editor built from the latest spine-godot sources.
