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Future Timeline Integration?

edited March 2017 in Extending the editor
Hi, I've recently been checking Timeline and its preview build and I think it's totally going to revolutionize how people use Unity. While checking Timeline out I've also started to think about how AC could integrate with it. I know this is far into the future, as Timeline is probably going to be coming officially until end-years or next year... and I think running an actionlist in Timeline would be as simple as making a custom playable, "but" I think it would be totally awesome if we could use AC's actions directly in a timeline. Such a feature would really make AC work flawlessly with it, it really feels like they'd be perfect with each other after all.

The preview build feels pretty stable too, so I think I'll be trying to do some projects with it in the meantime. I'd be totally cool doing some beta testing later during the year if you ever feel like starting any experimental integration, heh. I guess the API is still in the process of been built though, so I guess it'll have to wait later in the year or by the end of the year. Just wanted to place the idea over the table so you can think about it.

Anyway, cheers!

Comments

  • Yeah, it's been staring at me from the "todo list" ever since it was announced..

    Setting up the ability to play/stop/skip a Timeline from an Action would be pretty simple, but running individual Actions from within a Timeline?  Until I really go through the API properly, it's hard to speculate on how possible that would be.

    These things always carry more questions than it first appears - If you skip a timeline, can those Actions also be skipped?  What happens if you save mid-timeline?

    Still, it's an interesting notion, and certainly something to consider nearer the time.  Thanks for the suggestion.
  • Actually, I wonder if this is already somewhat possible already - ActionLists (scene-based and assets) can be run through script / events by simply calling their Interact functon.

    I can look into adding a variant that allows you to set an index parameter to start from (technically there already is, but it has an additional bool parameter that may stop it showing in the UI).  If the Action it starts from then stop immediately after, I suppose that then gives you the ability to run Actions individually from Timeline.
  • edited April 2017
    Sorry for the late reply (plus, considering your on vacations now, lol). Anyway it'll be great to experiment with this. One of the things Timeline lacks the most right now are proper "actions", which AC in turn has in spades. If we could easily call AC actions directly from timeline (in a user friendly manner), it'd be amazing. Plus, it'd give AC a timeline feature (which it lacks). Ever since I saw Timeline Ive been thinking AC and Timeline could be the perfect couple. Hopefully AC will sometime get an integration to it. :)
  • I'm not sure how user-friendly the process of calling individual Actions can be made, but v1.56 introduced the function RunFromIndex to the ActionList and ActionListAsset scripts, which allows you to trigger ActionLists from an arbitrary place.  An Action's Index number is listed in it's header.
  • Any idea how to integrate CineMachine with AC ?

    I've tried a couple of approachs in the editor, but I haven't looked at the API yet.

    Also, TimeLine looks crazy good.
  • edited June 2017
    As its still in beta, documentation is still very thin on the ground.  It's something I'll be looking into myself, however.  An AC Action that can run Timelines is already planned.
  • Lovely, I've been mucking around with Timeline as well and would be awfully pleased to be able to be able to use it with AC.
  • @DADA_universe Well, Cinemachine is pretty straight forward to use. You can deal with it by simply enabling and disabling the camera you want to use at the time, or you can use the camera switch based on currently playing animations. There's also a shot evaluation system (you basically layout a bunch of cameras in the scene and Cinemachine will detect which has the clearest or best shot and use that one). Or if you are using an Unity build with Timeline you can use timeline to blend and switch cameras. 

    You'll mostly just want to ignore the AC camera system (just keep the MainCamera script as usual). Though it would be cool to be able to manipulate the cameras from an Actionlist... Anyway, I do recommend you to use v2 if possible though, it has more features and it's way cooler, lol, it even has some great dolly track system (aka. camera on rails).
  • Oh yes, Timeline is really cool, it's got lots of potential packed in there.
  • Timeline seems like a cool feature very similar to AC's actionlists (love it when more and more of these things start becoming native to Unity), but the fact that it is based on an Animator seems a little limiting. They said at Unite 2017 that they are considering changing this in the future, so maybe it's better to look at how this develops before rushing to integrate it :) The basic support in 1.58 is at least a nice compromise. :-bd
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