Animation Engine - Runtime Changes and Fixes

Im sorry but im with the majority on this one, I understand they want to enhance the current animation system but many developers included myself dont have the time to go through 100’s of animations to set them accordingly, Plus we’ve built our entire games on the old framework. I’m sure the majority will agree with me on this and would rather Keep it as a toggleable feature. Not trying to be offensive but Im already used to how the old way works with overwriting anims with animation priority, I dont need it to blend with eachother, It legit broke all my animations and i thought i broke my whole game, Spent 6 hours to realize it was roblox adding something

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Please read and tell staff at roblox that this change is not needed, Or keep it as a toggleable feature

Im sorry but im with the majority on this one, I understand they want to enhance the current animation system but many developers included myself dont have the time to go through 100’s of animations to set them accordingly, Plus we’ve built our entire games on the old framework. I’m sure the majority will agree with me on this and would rather Keep it as a toggleable feature. Not trying to be offensive but Im already used to how the old way works with overwriting anims with animation priority, I dont need it to blend with eachother, It legit broke all my animations and i thought i broke my whole game, Spent 6 hours to realize it was roblox adding something

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I got complaints from some of the users today about the animations not working as intended. I had an inkling there was some sort of Roblox update that caused it. I’ll disable AnimationWeightedBlendFix to solve this issue for now, but just as @OneOzy pointed out… I despise the day I have to go through 200+ of my animations to tweak each one to adjust to this new update. Is there any possible alternative here? Please for the love of everything tell me some good news that there could be another possibility than to adjust all my animations to get them to work properly with AnimationWeightedBlendFix enabled. I am just a very concerned developer. If you do happen to know a solution, I am all ears. Thank you!

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Same boat here - my game has hundreds of animations as well. It’s going to be VERY tedious to go through each one individually to implement the fix.

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Hi, can you confirm that adjusting weight on animations loaded by the client and played by the client replicates to the server? Since AnimationPriority doesn’t, I only see changing weight as the solution, and it’s working fine currently.

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100% agree here. I tested it and it completely broke all of the animations I have uploaded so far and I’m only just getting started (I have at least 50 animations at the moment). I don’t have the time to have them all manually corrected.

Even though I have written a custom animation handler, it still relies on Roblox to play animations and the system was built and tuned around the way Roblox handles animations in it’s current state.

Even if I don’t end up needing to literally reupload animations, I could still need to change significant portions of my framework and reconfigure dozens upon dozens of animations. This is no small task.

It will require extensive testing, adjustments, etc to many animations to fix this.

Please Roblox, do not remove the disabled option

As a programmer, I understand the idea that it’s hard to maintain two completely different systems, but in all honestly that doesn’t seem like a valid excuse in this scenario. This will break many current and old games. I understand the need to overhaul the system but I think supporting the old system for longer is a necessity and frankly maybe I’m being naive but I don’t really see why it can’t just become the “legacy” animation system so as to not break existing content but just not receive major upgrades.

Roblox isn’t supposed to be Unity or Unreal engine, but for all the effort that’s going into advancing the platform it sure feels like anotner step backwards just to throw developers under the bus. It’s understandable that as time moves on, older systems will be phased out and older games that aren’t being updated anymore will break, but this is unacceptable…

Also, I think I noticed a bug with this change, will do testing and post later.

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Besides going back and manually reuploading every animation, is there anyway we can make our old animations work with the new engine?

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Your options are reupload or write an animation framework to account for the changes. (Or make an entirely independent animation system, which is frankly what I’m considering at this point)

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Couldn’t they make AnimationPriority replicate? This would fix everyone’s issue with this new system, as you would be able to set AnimationPriority via script instead of reuploading.

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This was just added just now and we were freaking out until I learned about this update. It basically broke the modified roblox-core “Animate” script even when the thing I’ve only changed in there was their Running and Walking animation, it automatically fixed it when I disabled AnimationWeightedBlendFix. Take note that Roblox’s implemented core “Animate” script is breaking your own addition.

AnimationWeightedBlendFix destroys all my animations in-game in my upcoming game that would release soon.


The head, and whatever is moving somewhere else and I disabled the modified “Animate” script already.

Enabling back the modified “Animate” script results to this:

However when disabled, it feels normal. Hopefully it remains this way, always able to get disabled…

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Fix our issue? No. Make it significantly less painful? Absolutely.

I already use a custom animation module and a custom animation priority replication system would suck up valuable performance and be stupid.

I have a band aid fix for the local client which is to play animations with priorities but the fact is I’m not gonna reupload 50-100 tracks and I’m also not gonna kill performance just so things look better for other players. Guess I’ll have to though. :face_vomiting:

Until now, the lack of proper animation priority replication wasn’t that big of a deal due to the way the current system works. With the new fixed change, it completely breaks it. So even if I spend the pain fixing it for the local player, to others it’s going to look bad.

So if Roblox would just make animation priority replicate (and I’m talking client <-> server, not just server->client), yes, it would make this forced change drastically better.

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Guys, this is a much better method than just animation stacking :smile:

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My animations are breakdancing instead working properly, nice!

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Ayo who the hell is benefiting from this?
800 Animations broke at the same time :smiley:!!
I use a copy of the Roblox animation handler and I use the correct priorities for all my animations but yet It broke? how?
Couldn’t you guys add some way for backward compatibility or maybe not remove the property in phase 3?

edit: This is an accidental reply this is supposed to be a general reply to OP’s post

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I am also having this issue. Caused a game breaking bug in my game because I rely heavily on those markers firing.

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I see the appeal of this, but still, I’m not sure if the ends justify the means here. There needs to be a serious internal discussion about if this is worth forcing onto people because the work that has to be done to accommodate the change is enormous. Yeah, stopping the tracks could work, but some people want to stack tracks without having to code entire new systems for their game. Some probably don’t even have the scripting knowledge to do that, nor a scripter in general.

For example, my morphs are meant to be inserts, meaning they can work in most games they’re put into. I have animations for crossing your arms that are purposefully meant to overlay on other existing animations, but I have to update the priorities for any of those overlaying animations now, I can’t just stop the underlying one, because it’d totally defeat the reason it was overlaying it to begin with.

For my work, this isn’t too much of a problem, because I not only have a scripter, but also not many animations that utilize that behavior. But for other people, especially ones with animation-focused games, it’s an absolute nightmare. There’s no way to bulk upload animations and there’s no way to change IDs quickly, or do it via scripting or anything like that. Sure, the new priorities do make it significantly easier, but it’s still a lot of work, especially depending on the amount of animations in the game, and how their priorities have been set up.

I think it would really benefit a lot of developers to make a toggle that uses the other changes, but that doesn’t blend the animations. There’s probably a lot of games with developers who don’t update their old games, and this could irreversibly damage their games. Think back to the “Compatibility” lighting setting. It emulates the old lighting in the new lighting engine, so that people can still have that look and feel. If this is totally unfeasible, then Phase 2 needs to be very long because as I predicted, most people didn’t even know about this until it started breaking when Phase 2 started.

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Very disappointing to see this issue was still not fixed, even almost a year later after reporting it. This is the only major issue that I have that CANNOT be fixed by reuploading. Numerous developers had already stated their concerns and the plans to decide to change the default behaviours knowing this vital issue is still present is quite baffling.

Not only are the last markers/keyframes in the animations not firing, but all keyframes near the 90% + duration mark also don’t fire. Especially upsetting when our experience has over 60+ places, each with numerous server-sided enemy variety that relies on these latter keyframes to determine their logic.

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^

I know I defended Roblox on this change (and to this day I still stand by some of my words, especially for the folks who just… put everything on Action priority, but some things could be worded better or not said at all), but as posted above a change to the animation engine has rendered critical components of our experience unplayable. We rely on animations.

Roblox needs to work more closely with a larger tenet of developers to ensure that the transition between the current and new systems are able to roll correctly and they need to pay more attention to the feedback here as well. If this issue was investigated and ready to go for the current system then we may not have been facing the same issues assuming we aren’t “using animations wrongly”.

We are a launched experience with decent traffic and are planning a large update within the next 1-2 months that will be introducing more animation-dependent systems and the fact that we now have to retroactively deal with these problems is a huge delay on our plans. The more this issue persists the more trouble we will have resolving these issues AND lose out on having a working experience.

Please address this issue.

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Really wished we could still disable the animation blend fix even after phase 3 and all that. Having to go through 100’s of tool animation, spawn animations, etc, to redo their weight is going to be extremely time-consuming…

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This sounds like a separate issue from the blending changes, so I will create a bug ticket for this. Certainly this should be fixed before Phase 3, it’s not an expected change. Phase 2 exists so that we can find and resolve problems like this before deprecating the old runtime.

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