In an experience with multiple players with improved model streaming enabled, if one client loads & plays an AnimationTrack, and another client does not have their character streamed in for themselves, the error:
exception while signaling: Cannot load the AnimationClipProvider Service.
will appear for any clients that do not have their character streamed in for themselves. This seems to be sporadic and will stop a few seconds after having their character loaded in.
Ridgeway County, State of Ridgeway is the experience this has been tested on. This experience instantiates the Animator class manually on all characters once they are loaded in (on the server) so that clients can have animations replicate automatically in LocalScripts without having the server do it for them.
Here is a sample video which demonstrates this:
This issue does not occur at all on legacy model streaming.
Since experiences with lots of players need their characters be Atomic, most to prevent far away characters being in the memory of the client, and even more important to mobile users, we are turning the characters Atomic but when we try to make the client perform an animation on another player character model, this error occurs.
Also the “exception while signaling: Cannot load the AnimationClipProvider Service.” doesn’t show in which line is happening.
Welp, at least we need to see the line which causes this. I came from a post that said we must check the model parent ~= nil to avoid this but need answers, no more questions…
There isn’t a line that triggers this particular error as it is an issue with how animations are replicated between players. Because of how models are streamed out on improved model streaming behavior, it is possible for an instance that is responsible for handling animation events (whether that be a humanoid, animator etc) to not exist for a particular player if it is in an area that is not streamed in for them. As a result, whenever an animation is supposed to play without having the necessary and relevant animator class present, it throws the error in the original post.
This doesn’t happen on legacy model streaming behavior as those aforementioned animator classes are not part descendants and get sent to the client alongside their parent models when the client joins. Even though the part descendants can stream out (i.e. body parts), the signal to replicate animations can still be received - just that nothing “visibly” happens when it is supposed to play an animation.
I’m also shocked that this hasn’t been fixed yet as it is (presumably) as simple as suppressing the error for this particular case. It also doesn’t impact gameplay in any way, but is incredibly frustrating for those that work on active experiences with this enabled as most users send their console log with nothing but these errors thinking that it’s relevant to what they are reporting when all it does is complicate things further.
