Animation Engine - Runtime Changes and Fixes

I feel like these updates will be a great implementation. As of now, animation editor has been quite buggy and to be honest, it has been too basic. Overall opinion, this is a really good update!

These changes break the NPC waving animations in Vesteria.

This NPC is supposed to wave at you, but their arm goes back behind their head for some reason. This animation is played at Action priority and the idle animation should be at a lower priority. Looking over our code now I can’t figure out exactly what’s happening but we may be doing something silly like accidently playing the animation twice at the same time. However, the animation works on production and breaks with the new animation engine beta

https://i.gyazo.com/eb0a2ad78e270055e9ece94b12bf3fea.mp4

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really weird, something like that also happened to me

Can you send me the asset id for this wave animation? This only looks like a rotation singularity issue.

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Don’t worry too much about this bounce issue bug, the fix for this will be live well before Phase 3, possibly even 2.

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Hello. I have been having trouble with my game’s animations being glitchy when I play new ones. I wrote a forum post but didn’t find an answer: Why are my animations broken?
I was wondering if this will fix my issue or if I should try something else?

It’s reassuring to know that you still care about our sanity! :P

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This really has to happen before Phase 3. Else fixing games will completely counter the “without loss of developer sanity” part mentioned.

I’d be really unhappy if we got more priorities at a limited amount, instead of just integer ones, though, so I hope integer ends up being what we get.

What game is this you keep mentioning that has literally thousands of animations that are all going to be impacted by this change? Can you link to it so we can understand what this scenario looks like and how this sort of thing happens? I thought my club game with 160 animations was on the high side of what’s typical.

Thank god.
So should we start fixing animations now, or wait until the issue is fixed?

Hey AllYourBlox, Does this mean we’re able to attach stuff to bones soon?
And if not, is there a workaround for the problem?

Not really. I’ve got around 20 models with 50 animations each. Do the math, and you’ve got the point I need to make.

I don’t use them for a game, though. They’re models I insert and use in existing games that a few friends own.

However, I’d be lying if I said I was the only person with this problem. If you scroll up, you can see a few people with tons of animations in their games having similar complaints.

To put this scenario into mind: If Phase 3 shipped without integer priorities, every developer would have to alter their game’s animation priorities to fit within 4 enums and not overlap. Because of only having 4 enums, developers would have to raise AND lower priorities for almost every animation that overlaps and hope they can fit it within those 4 enums.

On the other hand, if Phase 3 ships WITH integer priorities, developers can simply keep upping the priority of animations that need it instead of trying to make a brittle and very complicated “web” of animations instead of dealing with only 4 enums which results in things needing to be hyperspecific to function properly.

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This occurs using the stock “Animation” localscript when you disable, then re-enable it. This only occurs when AnimationWeightedBlendFix is enabled.

Other than that I’m loving this change!

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Same issue here, I figured out you can leave a custom Animate script in StarterCharacterScripts, which completely overwrites the default one, if thats what you are trying to do

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I’m relatively happy with this fix, a LOT more of my animation code is now using numbers that make sense rather than what I got from trial and error

However that wasn’t without it’s fair share of messing around with weighting numbers beforehand (and re-exporting of animations), and continually thanking builderman that I had the perfect number of animations to get them to work with the four animation priorities we have at the moment

My only real problems would be:

  1. That we have to manually change the animation priority for every individual track (provided we can even get priorities to work with our amount of animations), something that would let us change several animation tracks’ priority at once would be REALLY helpful, although I don’t know how feasible that would be
  2. The dang animation fading being broken which makes me really sad :frowning:

Aside from that I’m really looking forward to finally having more than 4 animation priorities because that was my favourite punchline to anything

Oh and also the weighting making some amount of sense and actually working now is cool too I guess

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dang

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I enabled this in my game and in some of my animations just for consistency I have animation events at the end of my animation. With this beta disabled I can use the animation fine and the event at the very last keyframe will fire. However, when I enable it the event won’t fire. Animation events aren’t very reliable either these days so I hope the replication improves greatly in the future.

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I appreciate that animations are being optimised for better performance, but I am concerned of the impact of the change on the way animations play in my game. I ran a quick test with the “fix” on a boss that heavily relies on animations, and, as some users reported earlier, there is that “bounce” effect during the transition between two animations which wasn’t there before.
Here are two examples:

Boss introduction

Without the “fix”:

With the “fix”:

Boss attacks

Without the “fix”:

With the “fix”:

The way I play the animations is by playing an idle animation, which I stop using :Stop() without parameters, then play the attack animation immediately using :Play() without parameters.Then I listen to the .Stopped event and play the idle animation again.
The priority of idle is set to “Core” and the attack animations are set to “Action”.
I tried putting the fade time parameter to 0, but it did not change anything.
I used Motor6D for the animations.

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Thank you for notifying us of some of these big changes.

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As stated above by staff, this is a bug that will be fixed by (or prior to) phase 3.

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