Project changes after some time?

Macamagucha

I don't know if this is a bug or some mistake on my part and I don't even know how to describe it well.

I have multiple, quite complex projects, that include a few characters with a lot of skins, meshes, bones etc. After some time I need to go back to those project, to update them with a new skin and export it to my game. Since I'm working with GameMaker, I work with version 4.0.64 and only this version, so I'm not changing it at any point.

Sometimes when I go back to the project I can see that something weird has happened with one or a couple of meshes on a few different skins, as if a bone has disappeared (it is removed from the binding thus making the mesh go crazy), or the weights just get reassigned to a different bone.

At the beginning I thought that maybe I clicked something by mistake, but this is repeating over and over again on different occasions and yes - I am sure that everything worked well before, as those projects were already exported and used in my game.

Did something like that happen to anybody else?

Spinebot

It seems like you are experiencing an issue where meshes in your Spine projects appear to be unbound from their bones, causing them to behave unexpectedly. This could be related to a known issue where project files might have unexpected changes, such as bones disappearing or meshes behaving erratically. While this problem has been reported by others, it is not clear what causes it. It might be helpful to ensure that you are using the latest version of Spine, as updates often include bug fixes that could resolve such issues. Additionally, double-checking your workflow to ensure that no unintended changes are made during project updates might help prevent this from happening.

Macamagucha

Update: I'm not 100% sure this is the case but I think that all meshes that got messed up were bound to a few bones AND a root bone. I treated the root bone as a "background anchor" for a few meshes and I think this is the bone that disappeared from the bindings and was randomly replaced with a different bone from the list of bindings.

Nate

Sorry you are having such trouble! We aren't aware of a bug like this and haven't had other reports of the problem. 4.0 is pretty old (3+ years) these days though. It may be fixed in a later version or possibly a bug regarding something unique to what you are doing. Of course simply opening a project after a while shouldn't have anything changed!

The most likely scenario is changes were made that accidentally made other changes, then it wasn't noticed until later. But if you exported and it was right and you haven't made any changes, that scenario can't be possible.

Unfortunately we don't have much else to go on that might help. I do wish GameMaker would update from 4.0 to 4.2 (or 4.3!). It shouldn't be an onerous update for them. I don't think rendering changed, it should be close to a drop-in upgrade. They'll need to call Skeleton update to advance the time, and change where they call Skeleton updateWorldTransform to pass Physics update, but I think that is all.

Macamagucha

Nate thanks for the reply! And yeah, no worries - I am aware that updating version 4.0 won't be possible and was hoping that maybe somebody could help me understand what was causing the issues and how to avoid them, but at the end (I think) I got to the "root" of the problem myself. 🙂 Maybe this will help somebody else also working with GMS and similar cases.

And yeah, I could really use the physics features. 😭