Add Additional Easing Styles

It would be cool to see more easing styles added. The current ones are: Linear, Sine, Back, Quad, Quart, Quint, Bounce, and Elastic.

With the release of the TweenService, it would be awesome if additional easing styles were added to give more options for developers.

Here are my proposed additions, which I have been using for many years from Penner’s easing functions in Lua:

The easings.net website is good for visualizing these.

If anyone else has any easing styles that they know of, feel free to pitch them too.

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I was literally about to make a similar post like this, support!

A generic [0, 1] → [0, 1] easing function parameter would be nice.

What do you mean? Isn’t that what the Linear style is for?

I think he means the ability to provide a function as easing style instead of picking a hardcoded one.

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That’s feasible but it wouldn’t benefit from C++ acceleration…

The point isn’t about making it faster, but rather giving more options for developers to use natively with the TweenService. Perhaps what @MrHistory said would be an option for this. But if we went that route, then I’d say it would also be cool to allow the TweenService to spit out the raw output too, and allow us to bind a callback to it or something…but that’s a whole separate feature request of it’s own.

Is the acceleration even necessary? Afaik the easing function is only being called once per frame.

If performance was even a problem inputs could be rounded and results could be cached on the C++ end.

Every animation in my game uses easing styles implemented in lua, and it works extremely well:

My code lets me pass arbitrary functions to my animation system, but there are a few styles I use often. The roblox engine overcomplicates easing styles, all they need to be is a method that transforms values in the unit interval. This is what my lerp module looks like:

local cos = math.cos
local sin = math.sin

local pi = math.pi
local pi2 = pi * 2
local hpi = pi / 2

return {
	--[[ Interpolation Transformations, aka "XForms"
		Used for transforming unit values
		Input Domain: [0, 1] -- unit interval
		Output Range: [0, 1] -- unit interval
		f(0) = 0 -- (might not be exact for sin/cos)
		f(1) = 1 -- (might not be exact for sin/cos)
	--]]
	lin = function(x) -- Linear, Slopes: {1}
		return x
	end;
	
	--[[ I named these years ago
		'a' means quadrant 1
		'd' means quadrant 4
		sinda = union{0,0, "sind", 0.5,0.5, "sina", 1,1}
	--]]
	sina = function(x) -- Sine quadrant 1, Slopes: {1, 0}
		return sin(hpi * x)
	end;
	sind = function(x) -- Sine quadrant 4, Slopes: {0, 1}
		return 1 - cos(hpi * x)
	end;
	sinda = function(x) -- Sine quadrants 4 and 1, Slopes: {0, 1, 0}
		return 0.5 - cos(pi*x) * 0.5 -- Perfectly smooth
	end;
	
	sstep = function(x) -- 3rd order smoothstep
		return x * x * (3 - 2 * x) --3*x^2 - 2*x^3
	end;
	sstep2 = function(x) -- 5th order smoothstep
		return x * x * x * (x * (6 * x - 15) + 10) --6*x^5 - 15*x^4 + 10*x^3
	end;
	sstep3 = function(x) -- 7th order smoothstep
		return -20*x^7 + 70*x^6 - 84*x^5 + 35*x^4 -- o_O
	end;
	
	bounce = function(x) -- Should be equal to the roblox "Bounce" easing style
		return
			x < 1/2.75   and x*x * 7.5625 or
			x < 2/2.75   and (x-1.5/2.75)*(x-1.5/2.75) * 7.5625 + 0.75 or
			x < 2.5/2.75 and (x-2.25/2.75)*(x-2.25/2.75) * 7.5625 + 0.9375 or
			                 (x-2.625/2.75)*(x-2.625/2.75) * 7.5625 + 0.984375
	end;
	elastic = function(x) -- Should be equal to the roblox "Elastic" easing style
		return 1 + 2^(-20*x) * sin((x*2 - 0.3/4) * (pi2/0.3));
	end;
	
	-- Static
	const_0 = function()
		return 0
	end;
	const_1 = function()
		return 1
	end;
	
	snap_0_1 = function(x)
		return x > 0.5 and 1 or 0
	end;
	
	
	-- Math
	sqrt = math.sqrt;
	sqr = function(x)
		return x*x
	end;
	
	--[[ Special Oscillations
		Input Domain: (-inf, inf)
		Output Range: [0, 1) -- unit interval
	--]]
	lin_osc1 = function(x) -- linear oscillation, aka "PingPong", Period is 1
		x = x % 1
		return (x > 0.5 and 1 - x or x)*2
	end;
	lin_osc2 = function(x) -- linear oscillation, aka "PingPong", Period is 2
		x = x % 2
		return x > 1 and 2 - x or x
	end;
}

If you’re worried about me not hardcoding pi for performance reasons, my Lua simplifier automatically does that before I publish :sunglasses:

4 Likes

Also, if anyone is interested, I just published a new Tween module to my framework. It mimics the TweenService-like tweening (and uses the TweenInfo object), but it uses Lua-implemented easing functions.

The important part here is that it spits out the raw value to your callback function, which can be more useful for people than simply forcing it to change a specific property of an instance.

https://github.com/Sleitnick/TeamCrazyGameFramework/blob/master/src/game/StarterPlayer/StarterPlayerScripts/Main.Tween.module.lua

The above file is dependent on this Easing module.

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Another suggestion is if EasingDirection had OutIn, as there still exists only 3 easing directions in the API.

image

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Would you be able to explain how you would find OutIn useful?

Happy to announce that these three easing styles are now added! It’s just listed as “Pending” at the time of this post, but it’s at least in the pipeline. Release Notes for 395

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