Add a standalone skeleton animation editor

[j-jorge]

Hi, I know that Axmol supports Spine animations, as did Cocos2d-x, but in order to edit the animations one has to buy a license of their editor. This is quite expensive and each user of the editor must have a license, so it does not fit an open source workflow.

DragonBones used to be a competitor of Spine but it seems dead now. The editor was closed source but its runtime is still available under a MIT license.

What about implementing a skeleton animation editor that would work with Axmol using the available DragonBones runtime as a starting point? I don't know how far we could get with ImGui and Axmol to build an editor, but the idea of having a lasting open source editor seems great to me.

[aismann]

I hope DragonBones extensions is retained, for it eases my creating skeleton animation, and cares for those without access to Spine PRO like me, though it's no more under maintenance.

Yet it's said that currently a NEW DragonBone (aka "Loongbones") has been published and under developement, so I believe it's still reasonable to keep it around.🤔

More about dragonbone:
#2387 (comment)

[antn9x]

DragonBone web (aka "Loongbones") is terrible, missing importance functions, lag. That's better if we can create Opensoucre DragonBone editor, maybe can use ElectronJs.

[j-jorge]

IMHO the editor should be written in C++ using Axmol and ImGui. We have everything we need right here, with a rendering that would match perfectly with what would appear in the final game.

[aismann]

@j-jorge
Who will start this?
It's not realy an Axmol native tool.

[j-jorge]

Well, if you ask me I would say "someone else" :) Because I have barely the time I need for my own projecy.

Even if it's not a pure Axmol tool I think it would be better to have it in the repo, always in sync with the engine's state.

Would it make sense to gather some funds to start the project via Open Collective? We may gauge the interest this way.

What do the top heads of Axmol think?

[aismann]

DragonBone web (aka "Loongbones") is terrible, missing importance functions, lag. That's better if we can create Opensoucre DragonBone editor, maybe can use ElectronJs.

There is another DragonBone port here (The planed editor can be interesting):
https://github.com/SGGames/DragonBones-Pixi

see here
We are working on a free and open source version of Next-gen Animation Editor call AnigoStudio and as soon as we have the working prototype we gonna open source it too.

[Ts-pe]

There is already support for Live2D (but not lua+ live 2d), which with a little bit of tweaking is the same (missing extensions), or add support for Rive (more for interfaces but can easily replace spine if you don't use so many plugins). The bad thing is that Rive is focused on vectors (maybe a parallel support, live2d for images, rive for vector).

Ah my mistake, creating a realtime dragonbones editor could be useful, i remember that live 2d has a viewer based on unity and fairygui the editor is made in this engine too. i see it plausible but it will have to be a new repository / independent project.