I was trying to port a PC visual novel to the DS (don't ask why, I was bored) and during testing I found out that Spine (software the game uses for character animation) seems to work on the DS. Not sure how well it would work on actual hardware though.
Spine works by creating a mesh that gets animated and textured from a texture atlas. You get 3 files: The texture atlas, atlas file which tells the runtime where each part of the character is in the atlas and a json file which contains information about the meshes, skeleton, animation etc.
All I'm doing is that I'm downscaling the texture atlas to fit in the VRAM banks (in this case 1024x1024 downscaled to 512x512) and running it through a little tool I made that dithers the texture to BGR555 (I'll definitely release that one after some polishing). I then store the atlas and json files in memory and load them into the runtime and do some weird stuff to render it. I don't think I can go too deep into specifics, because the Spine license agreement says that you can only mess around with the runtime if you have a valid editor license. So, see you once I have enough money to waste. Or once I find some sort of alternative.
Either way, it's an interesting way to animate characters, and I'm wondering, has anyone attempted anything similar on the DS?
Spine works by creating a mesh that gets animated and textured from a texture atlas. You get 3 files: The texture atlas, atlas file which tells the runtime where each part of the character is in the atlas and a json file which contains information about the meshes, skeleton, animation etc.
All I'm doing is that I'm downscaling the texture atlas to fit in the VRAM banks (in this case 1024x1024 downscaled to 512x512) and running it through a little tool I made that dithers the texture to BGR555 (I'll definitely release that one after some polishing). I then store the atlas and json files in memory and load them into the runtime and do some weird stuff to render it. I don't think I can go too deep into specifics, because the Spine license agreement says that you can only mess around with the runtime if you have a valid editor license. So, see you once I have enough money to waste. Or once I find some sort of alternative.
Either way, it's an interesting way to animate characters, and I'm wondering, has anyone attempted anything similar on the DS?