Later this week we are making some exciting new changes that will allow users to customize the way their avatar animates in game. This change will allow users to equip custom animations for their R15 characters that they will be able to use in game. We are making this post to give developers advance notice about how this will affect their games and how they can opt out if they so wish.
Website Changes
Avatar animations will be made available in the catalog, users will be able to purchase these animations and equip these on the Avatar page. In R15 compatible games, users will be able to use the animations they have equipped instead of the default animations.
Client Changes
The avatar animation format uploaded to the website looks like this:
When an R15 character is loaded, the StringValue from any avatar animations the player has equipped will replace the StringValue of the same name in the default Animate script. This means that when initially loading the animations, the default animations may be loaded first and then the avatar animations equipped on the website will be loaded in.
To prevent animations being replaced in your game, you should replace the default Animate script in StarterCharacterScripts with a script that does not reload the animations based on changes to the child StringValue objects of the Animate script. We will post an example modified version of the default Animate script showing how you would do this soon.
It won’t use the idle animation. There is a PoseAnimation AssetType that will be used for this. This won’t be coming out this week but it is definitely in the plan for the future.
Quick question: Will these be able to be previewed before purchase, or will we have to guess what they’ll look like when played based on the thumbnail?
So right now the only way to preview the animations will be loading them in studio and testing them out. @Seranok said he would support animations in catalog heaven so you can also try them out there. We will have a way to preview the animation on the website and also in the mobile avatar coming soon.
I think allowing any animation would break games. I could animate my character to be 1000 studs above the humanoidrootpart & be invincible in PvP games
Seems great, I would totally use these. One question, would there be “limited” animations. Or would there be pricing on kind of the “quality” of each of these. I wonder on how the pricing would work.
For those eager to see some progress on how it’ll look on the site go to gametest1. I am excited to see the upcoming 3d thumbnails with the worn animation.
Gametest1 doesn’t have the latest website code, those are just placeholder thumbnails. Initially the thumbnail will be a still image of a single keyframe from the middle of the animation, the 3d thumbnails will be coming later.
Yeah, I assumed so based on the screenshot you posted in OP. However is the avatar customization for animations on gametest1 final? I see they’re in different categories.