I would vote to have more levels of priority. Like you, I have always wondered why priority can’t simply be an int, with some predefined ints reserved for Roblox’s animation scripts.
Another advantage to allowing us to choose our own priority values is I can use them to identify which animations should be stopping before starting a new animation of the same priority:
local AnimationTracks = humanoid:GetPlayingAnimationTracks()
for i, track in pairs (AnimationTracks) do
if track.AnimationPriority == newAnimationPriority then
track:Stop()
end
end
I’m happy with whatever Roblox decide - especially if it’s in the interest of improving client performance - as long as we get time to update our scripts to support the new behaviour (Studio flag would be amazing).
The animation I provided as an example is not a jump animation in the sense that it plays when the space bar is pressed (should have clarified). It’s a dance move, it has to play over movement tracks because sometimes its done while the player is moving. I don’t want the dance animations blended with the walking animation that might be running at the same time. These animations have to be action priority.
More priority options would be a huge benefit, I’d appreciate that.
I’d also like to point out that regardless whether this was or wasn’t the intended behaviour, animations have functioned this way for the past four years (I didn’t use them prior to that so I don’t know if it was happening longer). That’s four years of games this could affect plus developers who are unaware the behaviour has changed and attempt to utilize the old behaviour. This seems like something that should have had a dedicated announcement post with instructions and workarounds + some warning that the change would occur and when.
I am glad that these changes would increase performance though. I believe our game is a case where there is some animation lag affecting the client as sometimes switching between moves can be slower than expected on older devices.