The June update for Spine is pretty big and introduces a lot of new features like support for play testing, better feedback and discussion functionality, changelogs per project and improvements for the rating system!

In the process of opening Spine up for other games than Gothic we added the functionality to do play tests via Spine. That means developers can put early versions of their games on Spine and let you play the game to get feedback. That’s happening a long time before the game enters a beta stage and is usually used to get feedback from unbiased players. We will use it ourselves for future projects and are in contact with some German indies to get their games into Spine as well.

A big step forward is the possibility to provide changelogs for project updates. The changelogs are then displayed in the update dialog and on the info page. While the changelog is optional, every update now has to be tagged whether savegames of the previous version are compatible or not. Also for every update now automatically a news get generated in the news ticker on the start page.

The rating system has been slightly improved with more improvements coming in the future. The total score now is weighted, so ratings of players that are more invested in the project or Spine can influence the rating more than those that just played a few minutes to give a negative rating. Also the info page now shows how many people voted how many stars.

Full changelog

Enhancements:

• Icons now are cached so they can be displayed in the profile even after uninstallation
• Added survey functionality for play test (beta)
• Added feedback functionality per project (beta)
• Added discussions URL functionality per project (beta)
• Added plugin support for Union 1.0h
• Mod updates now displayed whether savegames are compatible (beta)
• Mod updates now display changelog if available (beta)
• Newsticker now displayes all updates of projects (beta)
• Info page now contains the history of the projects including changelogs (beta)
• Slightly updated rating system

Fixes:

• Update date now is always at least the release date
• Fixed deletion of files when updating via folder
• Spine API now is correctly removed from game folder again
• 64bit Spine API now is properly deployed
• User ID API works now
• Removed gamepad support
• Fixed translation of two texts in the developer settings when changing language
• Start button now shows correct text depending on whether it’s a game or a modification
• Fixed potential crash in error case when downloading
• Added backup mechanism for download path
• When admin privileges are required to start a mod it can’t be started anymore without
• Start button now is also readable when disabled
• Start button on start page now is also disabled when start conditions aren’t fullfilled
• Unreleased mods won’t be displayed anymore for random page

For questions and feedback either use the feedback functionality, have a look into the thread @ World of Gothic or join our Discord server.