Problems with non-skippable animations in cutscenes lately

MAC

Hi,

I use custom animations of my mecanim-based character in several cutscenes. Because of the possibility to make them skippable I end them all with the idle animation. It was working for a long time but lately it doesn't work anymore. Instead of playing the idle animation when skipping a cutscene it now plays all containing animations at once.

Another thing is that some of my cutscenes are split into several "chunks", that are seperated by a non-skippable cutscene that only contains a "Wait for 1 second" action and then starts the next chunk . That way I was able to skip only a part of a somewhat bigger cutscene. That also workes a long time perfectly but lately conversations from a part of a cutscene that was already skipped pops up again when skipping a following cutscene part.

I guess this behaviour came with a AC update at some point but I can't say with which version. Maybe some AC behaviour changed, that I'm not aware of and that makes problems now.

Any advices are welcome.

MAC

PS: Forgot to mention: Unity 2017.4.4f1 and AC 1.63.0

ChrisIceBox

What version were you previously using that worked?

I'll need steps to recreate the problems, or at least screenshots showing the exact Actions involved.  A few things that I need to know:

1) How are you triggering the cutscene animations, and what does the Animator look like?

2) How are you playing the idle animation at the end, exactly?

3) In what way are Conversations used, and how/when are they integrated into the problematic Cutscenes?

ChrisIceBox

I've tried reproducing your "Skippable cutscene" -> "Non-skippable" -> "Skippable" technique, and things work for me as intended - though not as it seems you're hoping.

When a continuous block of gameplay-blocking ActionLists is run, the whole thing is treated as one.  If you skip the 3rd cutscene, all three are reset - though since the 2nd can't be skipped it's not instantaenous.

If you want to break up larger cutscenes into smaller skippable chunks, you need to instead have the "in between" Cutscene run in the background, so that the game exits "Cutscene" mode and resets everything.

You can prevent the player from moving / interacting etc during a "background" cutscene by using the Engine: Manage systems Action before and after the wait.

However, I will also introduce a function in the ActionListManager component that you can call to "clear" this data, so that you can have it run all as one continuous Cutscene if you wish - but it'll be a "use at your risk" feature, since it'll affect all Cutscenes that also happen to be running at the time.

ChrisIceBox

As for the animation not reverting back to Idle, load up the 3D Demo (Managers + Scene), and interact with the Camera Hotspot.

That's got a similar situation whereby the Player's Animator invokes a Trigger parmeter to play an animation, and then invokes the "EndCutscene" Trigger afterwards via the EndPlayerAnimation Cutscene.

This Trigger forces a return to Idle, but only if its Cutscene is currently skipping.

MAC

I don't know why this post wasn't posted yesterday, think I clicked the wrong button... Here it is:

Sorry, I really can't say on which version it worked as intended since I was working on other bits of the game and only saw what was going on when I made a test build of the game lately. I know this is quite helpless but it would be very time consuming to test all scenes/cutscenes/etc. on every update of AC/Unity.

Cutscene skipping:

Did something change engine-wise that affords these changes? I ask because the way I tried it (and was discussed here) worked good for some time. I made the changes you suggested to my cutscene divider script which now looks like this:

The conversation doesn't pop up any more as intended, but now my character isn't able to walk after skipping. Maybe I am disabling to much in the "Engine: Manage systems" action?

Animations:

I trigger the animations by simply calling a "Character: Animate" action with the "Play Custom" method, the same with the Idle animation at the end. All animations are on the base layer:

The Animator looks like this:

Formerly I had transitions from the used animations (Deform_Kinn_reiben, Deform_Facepalm) back to the idle state but deleted them to check if it changes anything, which didn't.

ChrisIceBox

Cutscene skipping

A number of issues related to skipping were fixed in recent releases, but I can't be more specific without knowing what version you were previously using.  I will look more into it, however.

The character not being able to walk is not an issue I can recreate - it could well be some other detail not included in your screenshots.  What about interactions, menu system etc - are they returning?  What result does another Engine: Manage systems Action that enables things again at the very end of the final Cutscene have?

Animations

Testing the same Actions with the Demo game's Tin Pot (playing the animations "rRobot|Robot_ShakeHead" and "Movement" through similar Actions), I can't recreate such an issue.  Try doing the same thing in the 3D Demo - it's important that we're both testing the same situation.  The "Trigger" method should be a viable alternative.

MAC

Just wanted to say that I fixed the animation issues when skipping by redoing my animation controller the way you did with tin pot. What I mean is I made up triggers for all of my single animations and used them to play them, along with the "Ignore when skipping" option in the action. Works like a charm now. I'm still experimenting with the other issue. Will give feedback if I know more.