Five days ago we shipped 0.5. Since then you've posted on Discord, opened issues on GitHub and asked on the Defold forum, and most of 0.5.1 is the answer to one of those messages.
Download 0.5.1, let the editor update itself, or open it in your browser.
#Live in the Defold editor
A Defold developer building a Metroidvania toolkit asked us a fair question: Spine models show up in the Defold editor, so why did a Rigby2D character only appear once the game ran?
Now it doesn't. A Rigby2D Model is a component you add to a game object, like a sprite or a Spine model. The Defold editor plays it right in the scene view: pick the animation and the skin in the Properties panel, press Space, and watch it move. The preview runs the same Rigby2D runtime the game uses, so what you see is what ships.
- One file, one click. File ▸ Export ▸ Defold model… writes everything into your Defold project: the skeleton, the images with a Defold atlas, the component and a game object ready to drag into a collection.
- Native in the game, driven by
rigby.play,rigby.queueandrigby.on_event. - Free to ship. No editor license, no runtime license, for you or for anyone using your toolkit.
The Defold guide has the details.
#PixiJS, natively
Rigby2D characters now play in PixiJS 8, on WebGL and WebGPU. A skeleton is an ordinary PixiJS container, so filters, masks, tint and pointer events just work, and it batches with your sprites. Meshes, IK, physics, clipping and two-color tint all play exactly as in the editor. For crowds, an optional WebAssembly core built from our Rust runtime runs about twice as fast.
#简体中文
The whole editor is now in Simplified Chinese: every menu, panel and dialog. Pick it in Preferences ▸ General ▸ Language.
#You asked, we built
Your posts on Discord and GitHub turned into these:
- Bone colors, to tell limbs and sides apart at a glance.
- Hold Shift while translating to move along one axis.
- Zoom the timeline with Ctrl+wheel, and cut, copy and paste keys from the right-click menu.
- Setup and Animate tabs, a timeline bar with frame rate, speed and timecode, and boomerang playback.
- Undo, redo, fit and show-bones buttons next to the mode tabs, with shortcuts in every tooltip.
- Slots fold in the tree, so busy rigs stay readable.
- A pixel grid for pixel art, and show or hide bones, masks, bounding boxes and paths one by one.
- Ease in by default if you like: choose the curve new keys start with.
- Double-click a
.rigbyfile to open it, or drop files on the window.
And fixes you reported: stretching IK now reaches its target when the chain is bent, weight painting keeps a mesh's animation, image sequences read their names correctly, and new child bones keep their length.
#Linux
GitHub's Linux build machines couldn't reach Ubuntu's package servers today, so the Linux AppImage
and .deb aren't on the release yet. They'll be added as soon as they build. Windows, macOS, the
browser editor and every runtime are ready now.
#Thank you
Every item above started as a message from one of you. Keep them coming on Discord or GitHub. And if Rigby2D saves you a license fee, a star on GitHub helps other animators find it. 🚀