Animation replication failing unexpectedly

[Pavalineox]

Hello!

We first reported some animation problems on April 5: Other players clipping underground and animation replication issues

Unfortunately we are still having some problems with animation replication. We are seeing issues in two of our games, Warrior Cats: Ultimate Edition (first video), and A Lion’s Pride (second video). They both show instances where animations are not replicating correctly between clients. Videos uploaded to youtube for file size purposes.

This WCUE video shows replication issues occurring upon load-in when no character is spawned, which seemingly fixes itself upon a character being set.

This ALP video shows replication issues occurring even when we have a character.

Some things to note:

• Both of these games run on almost completely identical code for animation and characters animations are handled in essentially an identical manor.
• The issue is NOT exclusive to our idle animation. Sometimes, movement/emote animations will stop replicating as well
• We’ve combed through the code (to ensure we wait for the animator before loading animations, etc etc) as well as the cloud assets (make sure priorities are layered correctly, make sure looping is on) and have been unable to find a fix or patch this.
• Adding onto above, we’ve tried changing workspace behavior toggles i.e interpolation throttling, etc. We’ve tried turning on/off streaming, changing model streaming behavior, etc. Nothing seems to fix the issue.

Extra addl. information:

ALP runs on the WCUE codebase almost entirely (it’s a test bed project that accidentally picked up an audience), so we expect behavior to be similar. Despite this, we notice that both scenarios shown above are most common in their respective games. That is to say, WCUE’s main menu will frequently show t-posing characters whereas ALP usually won’t. Vice versa applies; when spawned in, WCUE animations seem to encounter much rarer replication problems, whereas in ALP you can always find a decent amount of players who are not having their animations replicate. This is, of course, not empirical, just something we think we’ve observed, but felt it was worth including.

In ALP, one of our Motor6Ds is named “Torso”. This is really minor but felt it was worth including as in WCUE we have specifically avoided any mesh/motor6d sharing a name with any stock R15 parts/motors. Since WCUE is having issues as well we haven’t done this in ALP yet, but I figured I’d include this as a previous post mentioned something with “using a mix of R6/R15 parts/animations”: Character animations cutting out in bursts

If any more details are needed, we are able to provide!

Expected behavior

Since our idle animations in both games continually loop forever, we expect them to replicate without issue. In all testing instances, players have confirmed that locally, their animations are playing completely fine.

Since we rely on Roblox handling animation replication for us, we have no easy/quick workarounds. We’d like to avoid handling animation replication manually, so any assistance in getting replication working in a stable manner would be fantastic!

Thanks for any assistance on this matter!

A private message is associated with this bug report

[ShinyGriffin]

I am experiencing this behavior too. I have Idle animations that begin playing on the model when it is loaded in. The animal Model is a child of the player.character and the Animator is a child of an AnimationController which is a child of the animal Model. The Idle animation has an animation priority of “Idle”. I cannot see the Idle animations on other characters, but I can see them on myself. I CAN see the other animations on the other characters like walking and emoting, but when they are not playing the other animations, the model goes back into a T-pose. It is just the idle that is not working.

I have StreamingEnabled and ClientAnimatorThrottling turned on in the workspace. I first saw this issue back in April and it stopped. I noticed the issue again on June 6th and then stopped seeing it on June 7th. I started seeing it again today on June 14th.

Edit: 6/15/23 I am not experiencing this bug anymore.

[CorvusCoraxx]

We’ve made a change that should hopefully prevent this issue from occurring. Please let us know if you are still seeing this issue.

[Pavalineox]

Hello!

We’re still seeing replication problems shown in our second video, but it seems like what was shown in the first video has stopped occuring.

(Taken just now in a server)
https://i.imgur.com/nG4T4JL.gif

[CorvusCoraxx]

Do you know when those problems (in the second video) started occurring?

[Pavalineox]

They’ve been occuring since we published the game (a few weeks ago), and we’re confused since we basically copy-pasted warrior cats and switched the character rig out, yet we’re only seeing this issue aggressively occuring in a lion’s pride now.

It’s especially confusing because, in this case, that player does have animations that are replicating correctly, but in this case the idle for some reason doesn’t. It can sometimes happen with movement animations or emotes as well, but we see it most with our idle.

[iiSpeak_Lua]

I’m having a very similar issue. I have a custom movement system where the walk and sprint animations play indefinitely and are switched out by changing the animation weight.

On the client this works perfectly fine, but occassionally the run animation just won’t replicate and the player will appear as if they’re sliding accross the floor for everyone else. Is it maybe becase the animation weight isn’t replicating properly? Don’t know, but it’s frustrating to deal with.

[Pavalineox]

Hello,

We believe we’ve found the cause for this: It happened because we were loading the same animation ID more than once on a rig. For example, in this game we had two idle animations sorted in folders the game would try and load from, both of which were using the same ID. Despite trying to store them as separate loaded animation tracks (just with the same ID), it causes this behavior. Making sure each loaded animation never overlapped animation IDs fixed this behavior.

This is highly unexpected, as for the local player, everything behaves correctly. This specifically seems to cause issues with replication, making it incredibly hard to debug (we’d assume if trying to load two animationtracks with the same ID broke, it would break for the local player as well.)

TL:DR; Check and make sure LoadAnimation never tries to load the same Id onto an animator more than once. The animationtracks will work on the client, but will cause buggy replication behavior.