The 4.3 beta is now available!
April 4th, 2025
We are happy to announce that the Spine v4.3 beta has begun!
Our last Spine release brought physics and other great new features that make a big difference for your animations. For 4.3 we'll both add some big new features and make some of the most commonly used Spine features more powerful, plus our usual sprinkling of quality of life improvements.
Below are some of the changes already in the beta. Check out the changelog for the full list. There is more to come soon!
Transform constraints
You can now map transform properties to different properties. For example when you translate a bone, other bones can rotate. Any combination is possible!
You can "clamp" the constrained bone values so they don't exceed a range. World or local can be chosen separately for the source and constrained bones.
Transform constraints can also work like they did previously, but better. For example, you can map rotation to rotation, like before, but at a different speed or with clamping.
All of this opens up a ton of possibilities for how your skeletons can move automatically! Here translate X is connected to scale X:
Clamp is enabled so scale can't go below -1 or above 1. Translate X has a very small range, ensuring that scale will be either -1 or 1. The result is that the constrained bone flips when the source bone passes 0:
Adjusting keys
Previously when you moved keys up or down in the graph or you set new keys, Spine would keep your Bezier curve handles static. In 4.3 we are now super smart about adjusting the handles, doing our best to keep your curves intact. That means a lot less fiddling with handles to fix them up after adjusting your keys. One user reports that this speeds up their animating by 200%!
Import PSD
There is now an option when importing a PSD to have Spine delete all images that were previously created by importing a PSD. This prevents old images from being orphaned after a rename, so your images folder stays tidy.
UI scale
Spine has native support for 100% and 200% UI scale. This works well on 1080p and 4K screens, but may be too small or too large for other sizes, like 1440p. You can set other UI scales, but values like 125% or 150% used to be quite blurry. Not any more! Now all of Spine's text rendering is crisp at any UI scale, allowing you to dial in the size of the UI that works best for your eyes and monitor size.
Faster texture packing
The texture packer has always had a Fast setting that packs less tightly, but gets it done faster. It now gets it done much faster. In some cases, 8X faster! Not only that, but it also packs much more tightly than before, sometimes as good as not using Fast. It's worth giving it a try, as faster packing can save a lot of time during game development.
Folder color
It's a small thing, but you can now set a color on your folders for organization and quick identification.
Bone splitting
There are now more options when splitting a bone, and the viewport shows the results as you change options.
Feedback
Give it a try and let us know what you think on the Spine forum. We greatly appreciate your feedback!