Default R15 Player Animations Now Include Strafing and Backpedaling [Beta]

[BloxMachina]

[Update] November 21, 2022

@BloxMachina

Hello Developers,

Thank you again for your feedback, bug reports, and testing of this feature. We are happy to share that Strafing and Backpedal are now out of beta and available for experiences that choose to opt in!

As a reminder, with Strafing enabled and the default Animate script active, characters who move in directions other than the direction they are facing will use walk-and-run speed animations appropriate for that direction. Typical scenarios where strafing will be impactful are when users activate shift lock or when you disable Humanoid.AutoRotate.

You can opt-in for strafing in your experience by setting Players.UseStrafingAnimation to true. When ON , this property will override the StrafingAnimations beta feature, which will be removed. Strafing will only be active when the game and character are R15 and the owning account has not overridden the default Walk or Run.

Customizing Strafe and Backpedal

You can also supply custom animations to replace the default strafing locomotion if they meet the following criteria:

• All animations live under the Animate script
• All animations include the LinearVelocity Attribute
• Walk and Run are included
• All 4 quadrants of 2D motion are represented (forward, backward, left, and right)

As always, please share any feedback you may have down below.

Thank you.

---

Hello Developers, today we are releasing a beta for an enhancement to the default avatar walk/run to add strafing and backpedaling in situations where you don’t want the character to turn and face the direction of movement.

Before, a character would “moonwalk” when not heading forward, but now they will appear to walk or run sideways and backward while facing forward, as long as they are R15 and have not equipped a non-default Walk or Run.

Enabling and using the beta

You can activate the feature in Studio by going to the Beta Features panel and selecting the “Strafing Animations” beta feature.

Whether strafing is active for a given humanoid character depends on how you set Humanoid.AutoRotate and UserGameSettings.RotationType.

Strafing is enabled if:

RotationType is CameraRelative and AutoRotate is On.
or
RotationType is MovementRelative but AutoRotate is Off.

In summary, strafing is enabled when characters would be playing a forward animation when moving sideways. (Note that initially strafing will be deactivated if BOTH AutoRotate is Off AND RotationType is CameraRelative, but we intend to remove this restriction next week.)

We believe that the best use for strafing is a CameraRelative rotation experience such as a third-person shooter, but feel free to experiment! Note that you may want to set player.DevEnableMouseLock to false as well so that players cannot override your settings using shift-lock.

We also understand that there are scenarios where you are creating custom rotation behaviors and animations that do not require strafing movements, which is why we are offering this as a beta while we gather feedback from the community.

Here is a simple example of how the strafing behavior looks:

---

Coming early October

• With this beta feature enabled, strafing will automatically be on all the time unless you override walk or run with animations that don’t support strafing. The system will no longer consider the state of AutoRotate or Shift Lock.

• We will update the walk and run animations to better blend with strafing animations when the beta is enabled.

Future work

If this type of improvement is valuable to you, we will extend it to include the other motion style packs. We will also be adding other transitions and capabilities to the default avatar soon, so please share what you would like to see below!

Thank you!

[CreepyPikaCow]

looks pretty cool!!! (walks backword cooly)

[NobleReign (Noble)]

This is definitely an improvement on the default movement animations, nice job! In the future, are there any plans to give existing animation packs their own strafing animations, or will it always be restricted to the default walk and run?

update: lol i missed the part that said you would if people like it, i definitely like it and i really would love to see it come to the other packs

[12mrcool (NorthernCanuck)]

Oh wow, this is awesome! This is something i wanted years ago, but of course never knew how to. This just makes things much better

Edit: I see r6 isn’t planned to have this support, that is sad to say the least. R6 still is used and liked by many, it fits some games betterv then others.

I tried to test itv out for myself and it wasn’t working, i couldn’t figure out what things i had to do

[Moleza]

L, this is epic fr, looks like inverse kinematics, also, I HOPE you guys add something like:

SOME Gui that depending on the player’s movement, you will only need to put the animation you wish to - without actually scripting anything, this will help us alot And skipping many ‘‘time-eater code’’

Example:

Right Move: [Animation Id]
Right + Frontside Move [ Animation Id]

Left Move: [Animation Id]
Left + Frontside Move [ Animation Id]

same applies if
Backwards Move [Animation Id]

Idea would be some new Gui that lets you Edit every single animation in each direction that the player will be walking or being directioned to

[MrChickenRocket]

Fantastic! If you’re asking - I’d love to see a bunch of upper body motion packs added - most specifically for holding a rifle shaped object, and correctly having it all layered together so you can move, aim (angle?), shoot, reload, and swap guns.

If you’re just doing locomotion, there are a whole bunch of actions that would be wonderful to have basics for like pickup item from ground, pickup item from in front of you, open door, “use magic item”, flinch from damage, swing pickaxe into ground, swing sword left right, swing sword vertical slash, punch, kick, etc.

[TheCrypticRunner (Cryptic)]

@BloxMachina

The system will no longer consider the state of AutoRotate or Shift Lock.

Tell me if I’m understanding this wrong, but why is it disabled for Shiftlock? It’s the first thing anyone would think about when thinking about strafing animations, and I don’t know if it even works because of that. Are there any secret steps to take before making this work or something? It doesn’t work with the new or upcoming movers either.

EDIT: I was indeed understanding wrong. You just need to unequip your running AND walking animation. I wonder why they even make walking animations in the first place if they’re rarely ever seen.

[Abcreator]

Already receiving some warnings in my experience related to this update

(All I did was turn on the beta feature and walked around on a baseplate, the feature wasn’t even being used)

[StoneSymmetry]

Literally looks amazing!
Kinda reminds me of gta 5’s movement system.

[BloxMachina]

The only upcoming change is that strafing will be active all the time.
Currently, if shift lock is on AND AutoRotate is off, strafing is disabled. It is on only if exactly ONE of those things is true.

[towerscripter1386 (Tower)]

I wonder if it will support r6, does it means something coming big for avatars?

[TheCrypticRunner (Cryptic)]

I still don’t understand. The feature simply doesn’t work, no matter if either of those are on or off in any specific order.
https://gyazo.com/ad74e032408175074d847d0d103794ba
I’ve tried it with a tool which has an over-the-shoulder view too and disabled AutoRotate (without shiftlock enabled), and it doesn’t work on those either. The animations do appear within the Animate script though.

EDIT: It ends up just like someone else here, I have this error message.

I’m on a baseplate!

EDIT 2: It turns out that to fix this, you have to unequip your run animation AND walk animation. To me, the animations look a bit odd and somewhat sissy, especially the new front running one.

[BloxMachina]

This warning tells you that your account has an overloaded Walk or Run that does not support strafing.
We wanted people to be alerted in this scenario vs. just seeing nothing change.
If this beta feature is popular, it is likely that strafing will soon be added to many Walks and Runs.

[Abcreator]

This update outright errors if you force standard animations onto players - without players even activating the strafe (at least when I tried), also the fact that there isn’t yet support for any default animations confuses me, is there any reason why this update was pushed out without the animations being entirely ready?

I would personally like to see this updated halted until these issues can be solved, literally cannot play my Roblox games in Studio without turning off the beta feature as the whole animate script errors (every single frame) and stops animating my character.

To clarify, this is the warning that caused the constant erroring…

[Instance_Brick (Instance)]

Getting some very interesting bugs like this one, this feature needs some work but it looks good so far!

[BloxMachina]

There are no plans to support R6 strafing at this time.

[Aspecky]

Excellent update, but unfortunately the Animate script breaks when the Animation in Game Settings is set to Standard then this warning along with this error is received:

Current fix is to set Game Settings > Avatar > Animation to Player Choice, dequip your run and walk animations on your roblox avatar.

[MagmaBurnsV]

Roblox has been killing it with these updates! How many do we have today so far, 6?

But the way this is implemented is a bit… janky to say the least? Having multiple animations inside a bundle and then having the animate script run them doesn’t feel very ergonomic and is very cluttery, not to mention it adds even more noise to the already bloaty default animate script!

Perhaps designing a system that uses the new IK instances so it would work for all bundles? I’m not exactly sure how that would work with replication, but that’s just a concept.

Anyways, this seems like a really interesting thing to work on, and I might even try doing it myself. Really appreciate the work you guys do!

[Aspecky]

Yeah no one likes how they do their default Animate script, the way it’s setup is downright botched, they still load animation from Humanoid instead of the Animator, they are still using wait instead of task.wait, that one aint that big of a deal but still, and worst of all, every time an animation plays, they run Humanoid:LoadAnimation again, creating a new AnimationTrack and playing it, which is like, what?