Spine: An Introduction

Design Decisions

Wrapper

Spine is a high-level simplifying wrapper around a number of more complex, lower level system libraries. It allows you to focus on building your immersive creations rather than figure out complex bit-flag combinations or data type conversions.

Using Spine, you will be able to think and work more in terms of real-world concepts than digital hardware processes, but at the same time, you have the options to resort to platform-specific code if required for the project at hand.

Spine is authored in C++ and delivered as a shared library (a DLL file on Microsoft Windows, and hopefully soon afterwards, as compiled libraries for selected Unix-compatibles). Since C++ can be bound to many scripting and interpreted languages, you could create immersive applications in a language you are comfortable with.

Unobstrusive

S P I N E components are a set of C++ class objects that you command to implement your idea. Spine was designed to be lightweight - that is to have minimal dependancies and to impact on your design and code layout ideas as little as possible.
Spine tries not to get in your way, while providing a basic mental framework to order the complex functionality of an immersive, interactive program.

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