Spine’s April update improves some functionality that has been requested in our survey like info pages and also the download progress display.

We’re still not progressing as fast as we want with Spine due to some extra workload on our games Elemental War and Tri6: Infinite as you can read in our Progress Report April 2020. But as usual we want to release at least some improvements every month, so here we go.

One thing that has been criticized a few times was the download progress display. Since we changed the downloads in Spine 1.16.0 there is no dialog anymore blocking the UI during download and the progress was only visible in the task bar. We now added the progress also to the database. This only affect new downloads, so for patches you still will only see the progress in the task bar. But at least some progress here and we think about more improvements here.

As we plan to provide more infos in general in Spine, we added some first improvements to the info pages that have been requested in our survey. The info page now displays the release date and in case no description has been added a note including a link to the World of Gothic thread to report it and suggest a description.

The last change affects the mod suggestion algorithm when clicking on the info page without going through the database. So far a random mod that supports any Spine features (achievements, scores…) has been selected. Now the mods you played are also included and mods you already played are excluded. Only if there is no mod you haven’t played you will get a random mod. And if there are no mods using Spine features for your language you will get any random mod.

Then we also added a donate button to Spine. We have monthly costs to cover for the server and the development also takes its time, so if you want to support us financially you can easily do so now without searching for it on our homepage.

Another note: We haven’t added that many mods in the last months. Partially because there aren’t many new releases, but also because we don’t search for old mods and mostly add those we get asked about. As a lot of people want to play mods now due to COVID-19, feel free to request mods (always include download link and basic description as you can find it in the database).

Full changelog

Enhancements:

• Release date now is visible on info page
• When an info page misses a description there is an info about it now including a link the thread to submit one
• It’s displayed now in the database whether a download is in the queue or how the progress is
• Mod suggestions on info page when showing a random page now prefer mods that haven’t been played so far
• Added Donate button

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