I originally came up with this thought when playing around with other engines as I so happen to be fluent in as well(Unreal Engine and Unity) and before I go any further, no, I am not implying ROBLOX can compete against a engine like Unreal but when it comes to flexibility with animations, it can be improved to be a lot easier to work with.
As it stands now, if you want to play a animation, you’d have to play the exact id in the script itself. But what I propose is being able to link a animation to a revamped Animation Controller that has it’s own unique visuals to it. In this animation controller you can open a tab/plugin potentially?? and basically create a new animation state to it and have conditions that’ll trigger that state and the animation it belongs to and have the controller have a starting animation as well.
Here’s a little example of what I’m talking about forged in Unity
In this example I’ve set up 4 visual animations, Idle(Which would be played on game start), walk, run and jump. Now you may notice that there are 2 lines with arrows in the middle leading to each animation state in the controller. This is where the true functionality of the system would be at. Basically you could create triggers for this animation and a list of when you want (current animation state) to transition from that state over to (the animation the transition leads to)
Now how could this be integrated in a script form? Well I was thinking of 2 ways ROBLOX could create this. Keep in mind these are only ways I thought of, I’m sure ROBLOX could come up with much more.
Have a new object added to ROBLOX studio OR change how the animation controller already existing in ROBLOX studio operates(Turn it into the suggestion I made here)
then what you could do is create a new script and get the object from wherever it’s located.
local animationController = character.AnimationController
now what you could do is add 2 special functions inside animation controller called :SetTrigger(triggerName)
:ResetTrigger(triggerName)
when you set the trigger, it’ll essentially work kind of like a bool value. when you set it’s true, when you reset it’s false. So in that sense there are many ways you can go about creating this. Could just have one function, remove the ResetTrigger and then have a 2nd argument be true or false. Or you could just forget about triggers all together and add strings, numbers and bools to how you want animations to be triggered.
As a developer, I really would like to have this aspect added to studio. Think of the ways it could benefit animating in general. It would be a lot easier to change which animations are played from ROBLOX and adding animations yourself as well as switching the animations ROBLOX gives you with a custom animation. Maybe custom running or walking. Right now to do that I could overwrite the animation through the given animation script ROBLOX loads with.
Fact of the matter is, ROBLOX has made many ways for us developers to code, continuing to provide us with more and more stuff to work with. But one of the things it is sort of lacking in is giving us some sort of visual coding like unreal engine and even unity is opting for this type of technology and other engines are following suit. I’m not suggesting compete with any of them, ROBLOX needs to stay on it’s own path and I’m not saying a feature like this could be brought to light in a month or even a year with how busy ROBLOX is that being said I wanted to bring this technology to light anyways. I would absolutely love it if they could add something like this with potentially it’s own twist to it and potentially even branch off the visuals they have to other aspects studio may have!
Thanks for reading if you made it all the way to the bottom!