Animations for more than 1 character

I fully know how to do the animation but for ingame positioning, I do not understand how would I go by this

Not to mention the timing of the animations are a problem as multiple times before I had issues timing the animations and waiting for every single one of them to load did not help at all

I would like to get a idea of how I can

  1. Sync the animations
  2. Position the characters for ingame

oh yeah and I have checked some of the other related questions but they did not resolve my problem

It depends on how much you are trying to micromanage the animations of course, but there are relatively few moving pieces so it’s not terribly hard to do.

First, control the animations from the server. You can control players from the client, but if you are going to handle more than 1 model, you don’t want to be restricted by distance (clients have no control over models that are out of range, and not loaded).

Second, load the animations ASAP. You are right, they take a while to load. You need to wait a full second before some of the attributes are accurate (I’m looking at you, Priority). Get that out of the way. Model loads? Load the animations.

Third, take advantage of priorities. If you play an Idle animation, you only need to stop it to play a different idle animation. When you are working with movement, idle is overwritten… and so on.

Finally, I recommend figuring some queueing mechanism to stagger your animations. 2000 animations all trying to start at the same time is probably going to bog down the system, but if you split them up into heartbeats (60 per second) you are looking at a little over 30 animations starting at any point in time.

To your other 2 questions:

  1. Syncing is easy enough, even with staggering. You set the position of the animationtrack via the TimePosition property.
  2. This is less about playing animation, and more about the choreography of your game. Do you want the models to follow a pattern? You need to make a pattern. This could be curves, grids, single file, you name it. It will be a lot easier for us to help once you know what you want.