Thank you Shiu,
I will jump over to the Starling forum and see if I can find a answer there in the meantime... 
If it can't be solved, is there a way I can work around having 30 slots in my skeleton? (I assume slots are the core aspect of rendering)
I have considered frame-by-frame exports, but it would be a massive pain and ruin the immersion 
I can't help on this, but in my experience, using Spine + Starling I don't have draw calls issues. If all the animation sprites are in a single SpriteSheet (texture packer for me too) I only have one draw call.
bali33 ha scrittoI can't help on this, but in my experience, using Spine + Starling I don't have draw calls issues. If all the animation sprites are in a single SpriteSheet (texture packer for me too) I only have one draw call.
Thanks for that, sound's like it could be me all along... xD
Anyhow, I think today I will find out:
[] Does the standard json output have an effect over the xml atlas export
[*] What is causing the "batch" flag to be disabled
[*] If I try some simple characters, will it do the same
Hopefully it is my fault, :rofl:
Well I have removed 2 slots from the skeleton, and the draw calls reduced by 2.
So the slots are relative to the draw calls. Very odd
I also checked out the example "starling spine boy" animations, and it had a single draw call.
Then I checked the "goblin starling" example, and noticed it had over 20 draw calls.
What is making the goblin have so many draw calls!?!
Just created my own small animation, THREE DRAW CALLS!!?!
Could someone verify that it is drawing three calls per frame? 
It has a skin called "TestSkin" that you will need to manually set (we removed the default skin as a test to see if it was the culprit).
It might be related to using an XML file instead of a JSON file. Will need to wait for Nate to look into it.
SOLVED IT! :rofl:
It was using the following code to create the skeleton:
new SkeletonAnimation(_skeleData, true, _stateData);The "true" flag I believe forces each slot to be rendered as a mesh, and thus break GPU batching!
If I use:
new SkeletonAnimation(_skeleData, false, _stateData);It works as expected!
Silly mistake on my end that took over half a day to solve
Happy it is fixed now though!
Thank you all for the help, I hope to show you some of the Spine animations in the future!
Awesome! thank you for sharing
Ok, but why mesh models have so low performance?
I repeat my question 2 months ago:
viewtopic.php?p=13946#p13946
"I noticed that skeleton with meshes generates quite a lot draw calls (1 draw call per attachment, it doesn't matter that all images are in one atlas). An implementation uses PolygonBatch class, but I don't see too much profit from this way (a similar name to QuadBatch suggests that it will be fast, but it isn't). Any chance for more effecient solution? For example, 1 draw call per atlas, like in version without meshes?"
Pancho ha scrittoOk, but why mesh models have so low performance?
I repeat my question 2 months ago:
viewtopic.php?p=13946#p13946"I noticed that skeleton with meshes generates quite a lot draw calls (1 draw call per attachment, it doesn't matter that all images are in one atlas). An implementation uses PolygonBatch class, but I don't see too much profit from this way (a similar name to QuadBatch suggests that it will be fast, but it isn't). Any chance for more effecient solution? For example, 1 draw call per atlas, like in version without meshes?"
I noticed such low performance when rendering skinned meshes with the starling Skeleton from the Spine starling runtime as well. Looking into the issue I was able to get draw calls from 31+ to just 1.
Changed line 176 of SkeletonSprite.as from:
polygonBatch.add(image.texture, worldVertices, verticesLength, uvs, triangles, r, g, b, a, slot.data.additiveBlending, matrix);
to
polygonBatch.add(image.texture.root, worldVertices, verticesLength, uvs, triangles, r, g, b, a, slot.data.additiveBlending, matrix);
When pass sub textures from an atlas like the Spine Starling SkeletonSprite.as class does, the Polygon Batch flushes (uploading to GPU) for each image body part of the character, which is not ideal and results in a separate draw call for each texture/body part. This is because textures derived from an atlas main texture is a SubTexture that simply refers to the root Concrete texture that is the whole sprite sheet. The purpose of using a sprite sheet and batching is to have one draw call and better performance. So by passing the root (Concrete Texture) instead of the SubTexture the texture being passed to the PolygonBatch class never changes and stopped flushing in the middle of batch render calls.
@Nate hopefully this can be added to the official Starling Spine runtime...
Ha! gamebuilders, you are absolutely right. It works awesome, very simple mistake, huge consequences, so programming in a nutshell. Thank you very much.
Nate, Shiu, it's a obligatory fix to Starling runtime.
I'll make Nate aware of this. Thanks for the detailed explanation!
@gamebuilders your solution really solve draw batch problem! thank you so much
However after i changed SkeletonSprite.as, when i test goblin-ffd spine animation, i cant spawn many skeletons (tried 10 animations)
I got RangeError: Error #3669: Bad input (at flash.display3D::VertexBuffer3D/uploadFromVector() )
Digging deeper, it seems PolygonBatch.as buffers may be the culprit
