I requested this in the past for production-level animations – IMO uploading animations as assets instead of publishing them within the game as instances is awful. Apparently this is done for performance reasons: already encoded = less data sent across network, and encoding instances on the client takes time.
That doesn’t change the fact how awful animation assets are though:
- Have to manually publish each change because due to security reasons we can’t have an API to autopublish
- Animations are sometimes neither related to games (Game Assets) or my personal assets (e.g. an animation for a free model I make), so they don’t fit well
- Can’t dynamically create animations at runtime (e.g. variable bolt pullback length by model)
- Clutters inventory
- Can’t share
It’d be nice if Roblox allowed us to manually encode animation instances, in which case I could publish a zombie with a custom walk animation, and when someone plays a game that uses the zombie,the animation is already encoded from when I made it. If I need to dynamically create animations, I can use a Lua API to encode a keyframe sequence before anyone needs to use the animation. Ideal behavior is including animation instances with the creations that use them.