Questions about extending Spine in spine-pixi-v8

wiking_2_0

Hi everyone,

In spine-pixi-v7, it was possible to extend the Spine class and create a new instance using the constructor. However, in spine-pixi-v8, this functionality seems to have been removed, and all our Spine extensions in the project are now broken.

Could someone please clarify a few things?

Why was this change made, and what improvement came from it?
Is this the final version of how new Spine instances should be created, or is there a plan to update this in the future?
What is the correct way to extend Spine now while keeping compatibility with the updated structure?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Spinebot

The change in spine-pixi-v8 was likely made to streamline the integration with PixiJS and ensure better compatibility and performance. By optimizing the way Spine instances are created and managed, the runtime can offer more efficient memory usage and potentially reduce errors related to manual instance management.
As of now, the current method of creating new Spine instances in spine-pixi-v8 is intended to be the standard approach. However, software development is an evolving process, and future updates may introduce new methods or improvements based on user feedback and technological advancements.
To extend Spine in spine-pixi-v8 while maintaining compatibility, you should follow the new structure provided by the runtime. This may involve using factory methods or other provided APIs to create and manage Spine instances. If you need to extend functionality, consider using composition or creating utility functions that work with the existing Spine objects rather than directly subclassing them.

wiking_2_0

Thank you for the quick answer.

It seems strange that all PIXI classes follow the same approach, as they can be extended with custom entities allowing full use of OOP, but the Spine class cannot be extended and only its instance can be modified.
That feels more like a functional approach, while PIXI itself is built around OOP.

From the from method, it looks like the only optimization there is caching of the skeletonData.
Is there a place where I can submit a request to bring back support for extending Spine in future versions?

Maybe the object generation logic for creating a Spine instance could be moved to a separate method, for example, getInitData. Then the from would keep working as before, but it would also allow extending Spine and creating it via the constructor after obtaining the proper initialization data from getInitData.

Or could I contribute these changes myself?