Two animation issues that have gone unaddressed

[ChadTheCreator]

Howdy developers/Roblox staff!

Today I’m taking a moment to write up this thread in the hopes that we can get some information on this topic and perhaps even get them addressed. If you’re a developer or Roblox staff and you have any insight to offer on this topic, anything is appreciated. Animations on Roblox have been around since 2014 - around 7 years now.

Priorities
In the past 7 years multiple developers both big and small have requested more animation priorities. We had 4 in 2014 and in 2021 we still only have 4. Perhaps my knowledge of the platform is limited, but wouldn’t turning this feature into a simple integer with, say, 64 or even more priorities be a simple addition? Or even just adding those to the Enum? In particular, I made this exact same thread 3 years ago when I was working on a system for my game - and in the intervening time almost nothing has happened with animations except for workspace.AnimationWeightedBlendFix and workspace.ClientAnimatorThrottling. I have linked at the bottom some other threads requesting this exact same topic be addressed. We have needed more than four and we still need more than four. Is there something going on behind the scenes that is the reason for this not being updated?

AdjustWeight
This goes hand-in-hand with the above topic, because whenever I confront this issue other developers will suggest using AdjustWeight. But AdjustWeight has known bugs regarding replication - another topic which multiple developers have requested a fix for but has not been addressed. Another bug regarding AdjustWeight which has not been addressed in years: setting AdjustWeight to 0 actually stops the animation instead of revving the weight down to zero. This bug has been encountered by quite a few developers and each of them had to find out about it the hard way after a ton of unnecessary bug testing. Compounded with the Priority issue, this puts a massive and unnecessary hinderance on animations in general.

EXAMPLES OF COMMENTS REQUESTING MORE THAN 4 PRIORITIES:

Roblox should allow more than 4 priorities for animations

Hello developers, and hopefully some staff members I feel as if animations should have more priority choices, perhaps 8 or 16. More would be useful too. Currently there are only 4: Core, Idle, Movement, and Action. These priorities are great and help a lot with automatically playing more important animations over lesser background animations. https://gyazo.com/29700788df89f307b7bcbcc6a3219298.mp4 Obligatory gif for entertainment After experimenting with AdjustWeight and other weight-related …

Too few animation priorities

My game uses quite a large number of different animations, and I keep finding them clashing together in unexpected ways because they have the same animation priority. Why are there only 4 priorities? Shouldn’t it be an Int value like ZIndex for GUIs? This is honestly a pretty simple change that won’t even affect older games provided the old priorities become numbered from 1-4. Even just adding one or two more types would be extremely helpful.

Release Notes for 478

Second to this! Blending is nice, but it’s kind of chaotic to deal with with only four animation priorities. Also would be nice if these custom priorities would replicate.

EXAMPLES OF COMMENTS MENTIONING ANIMATION WEIGHT NOT REPLICATING PROPERLY:

Replicating Animations

AdjustSpeed does AdjustWeight doesn’t

AnimationTrack:AdjustWeight improperly replicates

Note: This happens when Workspace.FilteringEnabled is true or false AnimationTrack:AdjustWeight leads to some interesting results when played on a Server/Test Server. Attached it a repro file. The following videos attempt to demonstrate what’s going on. Pay close attention to the Head part PLAY SOLO https://streamable.com/qeyc Working as intended! TEST SERVER https://streamable.com/cxty (left server, right client) You can see in the Test Server example that neither screen is accurate. …

Animation optimization & fixes

@zeuxcg Possibly :AdjustWeight(float weight, float fadeTime) doesn’t work as intended? As you likely know, the idle and walk animations in the Character’s Animate script are Core priorities and have a weight of 9 &1 (idle Animation1 and Animation2) and 10 (WalkAnim). I tried running another Core priority animation and called :AdjustWeight(11,0.1) on it, but it didn’t quite give the desired result. Is there something I’m forgetting, or something I didn’t know? I assumed the default weights fro…

A lot of these threads/comments are YEARS old. The animation priority limitation to only four is a bit of a roadblock and work-arounds are required for a few of us - but AdjustWeight not properly replicating has apparently been a bug since 2016, if not earlier. Why have neither of these been addressed?