Stop sending updates to the character. Figure out how to pause or scale the updates leading up to the point you want to pause.

If I were writing a game where I stopped the action, I would probably slow down leading up to the stopping point, and then speed out of it. In that case I would use easing curves. There is plenty of easing code out there.

The general technique goes like this: your hero's strike animation is 0.75 seconds long and you want to stop the animation at 0.50 to show your effect and then speed back out. Instead of handing the updates directly to the animation, send them through the easing function and that supplies your updates you send to your animation.

From [0.0 -> 0.5] seconds, I would use an easing equation to slow down the updates. Something like ease_out_quadratic.
For X number of seconds, I would pause the animation.
From [0.5->0.75] I would use ease_in_quad to continue the animation.

The only real hitch there is that most easing functions return the time value and you want the delta. That simply means you need to keep track of the previous easing value (starting at zero) and subtract that from the newest value to get a delta to send to

Generally speaking, you're always using an easing equation to send updates to the animation, it's just that you are using a linear equation. Also, when you pause your animation, that's a constant update function that returns 0.0 for X seconds.

Which means that if you are clever, you should be able to write a queue of easing functions that control your character animations:

[ 0.5 ease_out_quad] [ X return 0][0.25 ease_in_quad] // slowdown / pause animation
[∞ Linear: return updateTick] // normal animation

And if that all sounds too complicated, well, just stop the skeleton Node from getting updates...

https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spi ... n.cpp#L121

Want you want to do is override the default functionality of the SkeletonRenderer, which is a base class of SkeletonAnimation.

Something like:

class SkatouSpineAnimation : public SkeletonAnimation{
public:
void update (float deltaTime) override {
// custom code
if(!paused) SkeletonAnimation::update(deltaTime);
}

}

Then, instead of spawning SkeletonAnimations, use SkatouSpineAnimation exactly as you would SkeletonAnimation.

There may be some cocos2d-x way of stopping updates?

Yes, cocos2d-x has a built in way to do this. If you want to pause everything the character is doing you can simply use:

SkeletonAnimation *_character = ...

...

// pause
_character->pause();

// resume
_character->resume();

NOTE: this also pauses any actions being performed on the character. If you want to continue the actions, but just pause the animation, do this instead:

// pause
_scheduler->pauseTarget(_character);

// resume
_scheduler->resumeTarget(_character);

_scheduler is declared in the Node class, so all classes that inherit from it have access to it.

jpoag wrote

Want you want to do is override the default functionality of the SkeletonRenderer, which is a base class of SkeletonAnimation.

I tried this, but my resulting CustomSkeletonAnimation loses the drop-down menus in the Unity Inspector. E.g. The drop-down menu "Animation" becomes a public string "AnimationName".

I want to accomplish something similar as OP. I just want my character to freeze in the position of the last key frame in a given attack animation until I clear the AnimationState with AnimationState.ClearTracks() or another AnimationState.SetAnimation(). I know I can accomplish this by extending the last key frame over a bunch of frames in the Spine editor, but I want to control this with code which will provide much more flexibility.

Can this be achieved in the current version of stock Spine? Or does anyone know how to do this in Unity?