up to date and stable rig/skeleton library or approach?

[jferret]

Hello,
I am new to Löve. I really... loved... the approach, feels like a great prototyping tool that fits me, and seems like some great finished games have been made with it as well.

I was wondering if there is any up to date and stable (and in development) rig/skeleton library, or a more or less common approach, for characters. I am imagining something basic, that simplifies having a character made of a few parts that remain connected at the right places, during movement.

I tried searching for rigs, skeleton, etc, but either I found nothing, or only old looking libraries, under no development. I may be wrong.

Thank you very much for your help.

[dusoft]

https://github.com/love2d-community/awe ... #animation

As you said, most of these addressing skeletal animation are old. But if they are working, there is nothing wrong with being old (if they are feature-complete). I haven't worked with either of these, so I can not vouch for them.

Check also these:
https://github.com/sbseltzer/love-bone (well documented)
https://github.com/excessive/love3d-dem ... mation.lua

You don't mention if you are looking for 2D or 3D.

[jferret]

Thank you.

Imho if Löve itself last update was 9 years ago, I may not consider using it, as it exists in a technological context that usually moves very fast, so it may fall behind. I know webdev better, and a 9yo CMS is probably not up to date with related languages (PHP, JS, CSS... ) web servers, people's expectations of what they should be able to do, etc.

I use the 9yo figure because, for example, love-bone had its last commit that many years ago. It even says [WIP], but does not seem much in process anymore?

Oh, and I was thinking 2D rig/skeleton.

Thank you for the link to awesome animation repo section, very useful!

[slime]

Imho if Löve itself last update was 9 years ago, I may not consider using it, as it exists in a technological context that usually moves very fast, so it may fall behind. I know webdev better, and a 9yo CMS is probably not up to date with related languages (PHP, JS, CSS... ) web servers, people's expectations of what they should be able to do, etc.

Game libraries don't have much in common with the web ecosystem. They often (not always) mostly rely on fundamental principles of math and physics as well as the programming language, none of which get replaced every 3 months.

[jferret]

Thank you for the insight, slime.

Fundamental principles of math and physics being replaced every x would make for a fun game scenario!

So I take from your answer that you thinik it would be safe and more or less near-future proof (within reason) to use any of these libs, such as love-bone, andross or skeletor, even if they have not been in -apparent- development for 9, 8 and 6 years respectively. I saw that Löve was updated about a year ago with fixes later in April, and I was even considering if this libs may be out of date with the language itself.

Thank you again very much for the advice.

[slime]

So I take from your answer that you thinik it would be safe and more or less near-future proof (within reason) to use any of these libs, such as love-bone, andross or skeletor

I have no idea whether any of those libraries are going to work or keep working for you - my point was just that when working with game libraries, the last commit date will not be a very useful way to judge that a lot of the time.

[jferret]

Ok, I understand.

Then my question could be changed to ask if people in the forums can recommend by experience any of those, or other, libraries or approeaches for 2D rig/skeletons for characters

Thank you very much.

[RNavega]

LÖVE with Lua (the LuaJIT flavor of Lua) is very fun and fast to work with.
My first experiment was exactly writing the most performant / lightweight 2D skeletal animator I could profile. The sweet spot between performance and simplicity was something CPU-based with FFI typed arrays: viewtopic.php?t=89301

You need to worry about what program you'll be using to rig + animate, as that'll dictate the scene file format. In my case I had to write a .Lua scene exporter for Blender: https://github.com/RNavega/2DMeshAnimat ... ter-add-on
For 2D skeletal animation, I only recommend using Blender if you're intermediate to advanced with it, as it's free but has a high learning curve.
Maybe also consider DragonBones, Spine, Live2D, Moho etc.
(Blender can be used to make the same things as all of those, it just takes more time setting up your scenes to be used as templates, testing out different workflows etc.)