Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariSpine vs Pyxel Edit
When comparing Spine vs Pyxel Edit, the Slant community recommends Spine for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D animation tools for game development?” Spine is ranked 2nd while Pyxel Edit is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose Spine is:
Spine provides integrated modules for 14 major engines including GameMaker Studio, Cocos2Dx, LOVE, MonoGame, Unity, XNA, Flash, HTML 5, libgdx, Corona, and more. Generic runtime libraries are also available for C, C++, Objective C, C#, JavaScript, Lua and ActionScript 3. Dozens of third party libraries support additional targets.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Integration libraries support most engines
Spine provides integrated modules for 14 major engines including GameMaker Studio, Cocos2Dx, LOVE, MonoGame, Unity, XNA, Flash, HTML 5, libgdx, Corona, and more. Generic runtime libraries are also available for C, C++, Objective C, C#, JavaScript, Lua and ActionScript 3. Dozens of third party libraries support additional targets.
Pro Simplified UI allows for an easy learning curve
No-nonsense workflow allows you to create your artwork in programs much better suited for the task like Illustrator and Inkscape for example, while Spine itself focuses only on the important task of skeletal animation.
Pro Allows for easy use of artwork from third party programs
Spine's developers provide scripts which makes exporting artwork from third party programs much easier to do.
Pro Community-driven feature roadmap
Esoteric Software maintains public Waffle issue trackers to help plan and prioritize feature additions.
Pro Funded via Kickstarter
Spine received resounding support from Kickstarter backers, beating its pledge goal by over 5 times. A second successful Kickstarter added meshes and other important features.
Pro Price high for this product
Pro Supports animations
Tiles can be animated within Pyxel Edit, with "onion skin" frame overlays to assist in making smooth frame transitions.
Pro Intuitive UI
Pyxel Edit is widely acclaimed for its ease of use.
Pro Tileset extraction
Given an image and specified tile dimensions, Pyxel Edit will extract a tileset with no duplicate tiles. This mostly works for flat images though. If you feed Pyxel "finished maps" you will still get a lot of duplicates.
Pro Tilemap serialization support
Tile-based images (maps) built in Pyxel Edit can be serialized via XML or JSON for easy import elsewhere.
Pro Cheap compared to others
For only $9 (£6), this is one of the cheapest but also one of the best pixel editors out there.
Pro Live tile-update
Instantly see if your tiles are tileable and/or seamless and fix it easily.
Pro Indexed tiles can be used for reusing objects in animations
Cons
Con Spine Professional is expensive
Spine Essential includes nearly all features, except IK, weights, and meshes. Spine Professional is expensive, though it does give all future updates for life (Spine is updated very often).
Con Requires EVERY developer to have a license
Ever developer needs a license, not just the animator, or an overall license for the project. The license agreement is extremely restrictive.
Con Doesn't support gamemaker 2.3
Con No integration for lesser known engines
Spine does not directly support some game engines, such as Construct 2 or Clickteam Fusion.
Con development has stopped -- developer has stated 8/20 that a new version will be released soon
Con Lacks some tools
Con No Linux version
There is no Linux version of the editor.
Con Free version lacks features
The free version of Pyxel Edit is an outdated beta. It does not receive updates.
Con Proprietary, closed-source software
This software does not respect your freedom.
Con Mac version is dependent on Adobe Air
The OSX version of the application requires Adobe Air to run.
