Honestly, there needs to be a proper animation testing area, the current workflow is really bad.
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Get rid of this update right now please.
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Our game is an interesting case. Our game has vehicles with rotating and elevating turrets, and we use animations to rotate/elevate the turrets and guns (animation that is a 360 degree spin over its duration and tweens to the correct part of the track to get the desired orientation).
Anyways, when this change was activated on all experiences the other day, it made all of our rotations jittery and severely impacted our player’s ability to aim.
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Yeah, even though it’d still be a painful amount of work, it’s not as bad as having to load, update, and reupload every animation. It’s even worse if the animations are buried under hundreds of others, as you then have to find them or filter by ID. If there was a way to automate the process, it wouldn’t be so bad.
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Agree. Outrageous for Roblox to just go “hey developers we made the decision to break all animations and it’s up to YOU to correct for this”.
It is time to upgrade the animations system but to throw every developer under the bus in the process is not the way to go for a company like this.
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one small issue this isnt ‘most games’ this is roblox and we are a bunch of lego fellas with 4 animation track priorities (im not counting action 2 3 4 bla bla because its still action, awful bandaid “fix” and also is just an actual admittance of defeat to how broken and half-baked this new system is)
i sure hope you’re not telling me you broke my game over a platform that cant even play my game (i dont allow xbox+no controller inputs) because that might be one of the most disappointing reasons ive ever heard to break something ive spent months of my life making. yeah we broke ur game so a control-style your game doesnt support can play your game (Except now no one can.)
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I really hope this update gets the attention it needs like the material update, I fear it may go as planned if not enough people know about it.
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its already extremely under the radar compared to the material changes’ reaction unfortunately. im worried its just not gonna get enough attention
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The fact that this topic doesn’t even appear when sorting through #updates doesn’t make me feel any better (or maybe I haven’t scrolled enough or I’m blind), continuing to reply here doesn’t bump it up anywhere so the only way this can get any attention is if someone makes a dramatic Twitter post (which I’m not gonna do, I prefer my sanity)
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Characters in my game are now just randomly playing walking animations when they are supposed to just be idle (after an animation finishes.) Did nothing that would cause this and older versions of my game also have the same bug, so the issue is likely attributed to this update. Really hope there is a solution soon.
Update: I disabled AnimationWeightedBlendFix and the issue is resolved now.
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Then how’d you get multiple animations that affect the same thing running at once? And character animations HAD to have a higher priority, otherwise they wouldn’t play because of the default character animations, with this change atleast they’re blended automatically.
Phase 3 should never come out. No dev should be required to go through every single game of theirs just to go through tons of animations to fix their priorities as well as going through their scripts to adjust all the logic relating to animations. Why must Roblox constantly make updates like this that just completely disregard legacy content? It sure is a good way to create distrust between Roblox and developers, because what I make today might as well be broken tomorrow if Roblox wishes.
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Is there any notice of when or if it will come out under current Roblox plans?
Someone has claimed it’s soon, but I’d like to know when
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This was actually an issue I had. My comrade @BoojieQ ended up having to completely the animation script to accommodate the update. Strangely, the walking animation wasn’t supposed to play anyway, because it gets stopped before the idle. Although he was more than capable of remaking the animation script, I recall him finding it somewhat frustrating and it was unnecessary work that was brought about by this change. I also had to do my fair share of updating for that same project, which was not fun, especially because of some personal circumstances.
It’s draining to do.
Just like the materials update, as well as the CSG update (until recently), it’s ambiguous. Frustratingly, Phase 2 was intended to roll out several months ago, but it’s been over 6 months since then and it only started recently. Phase 3 could take forever due to this backlash. My guess is that until the more glaring issues with Phase 3 (the marker stuff, not the blending) is fixed, it won’t be pushed. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if this goes completely under the radar for several months, and then Phase 3 more or less jumps everybody who thinks the update got shelved due to backlash.
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This appears to have broken NPC walk animations in universes of mine with 50+ subplaces and hundreds of NPCs.
Any chance that toggleable workspace behavior could be added to the universe settings as a whole in the future? Entering 50+ individual places to switch it off and/or replace the default Roblox animation scripts is a bit tedious.
Also this fix appears to only be visible in a playtest mode with a client, meaning the behavior when running solely the server previews the animations just fine. Was weird to repro.
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Let’s say you had an idle animation playing. You initiated a sword swing animation to play, of the same priority. You no longer see the idle, and the sword swing plays over it, and when it is finished, returns to the idle.
Now, you could set the idle to a lower priority to the sword animation, but that would get you the EXACT same result, so there was really no point in organizing priorites as it saved a little bit of time.
And about them not playing over the default character animations, when using the Moon animator plugin, exporting an animation automatically sets it to the highest priority, “Action”.
So, what I meant was that while priorities are needed, there was (usually) no need to manually set them.
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This forced change would be easier to deal with if animation priority replicated. That way we could at least correct animations in game without having to reupload dozens of not hundreds of animations.
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Man Roblox does the same thing with the mass + joint system too.
I don’t want a uniform hierarchy. I just want within my set of highest priority animations the ability for them to supersede each other. I do not care about their weight in the first place. Most animators don’t, not just because the code was bugged.
It’s not even a great hierarchical system, either. I’m being told to reproduce all my animations (NOT in real time since for some reason priorities cant replicate if changed live) to a list of 4 states where if I don’t want my animations randomly cancelled by a player movement then my list of usable priorities was… 1.
The blended weight sum is like, by technical wording a fix (and by note really the only actual fix presented), while it can work okay in my game the headwork is completely unnecessary, unprecedented and obnoxious. Lots of developers probably have independent code/modules that hook on to the animation system and now they’re told to casually make a queue system that real time updates the weights across all animations as they start and finish (or alternatively run :GetPlayingAnimationTracks() every frame, which is unwanted). Most do not wish to do that, alongside the large sum of finished codebases nobody can do that for.
We should only be beginning migration after the new feature set is introduced. I’m excited for what nuanced blending / parallelisation options are in future however the planned implementation misses the mark for how developers actually use the animation system.
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Probably the best way this could have been worded, honestly.
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If this is going to improve our client’s performance, then I’m for this change. However, it is a huge undertaking to try to reupload all our animations with a different priority.
Fixing the bug preventing clients replicating priority and looping that’s been open since 2018 would help a lot. Then we can at least programmatically change our animation’s priorities. It also gives us a chance to experiment with optimal priorities before we commit to reuploading all our animations.
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