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:gab: Gab from the future ⚠️

This is legit and can be used as godot learning materials, but corresponding videos were recorded prior to godot 4.3. Godot 4.3 introduced new SkeletonModifier3D class and it literally destroyed all my worries about animation problems and solutions listed below.

Watch other videos about SkeletonModifier3D for more details.

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Godot animation layering pipelines for big games

• desc

Let’s make an ability to use a gesture while maintaining the control of the character with directional inputs from WASD or joystick. It will also help us to make some secondary mechanics such as withdrawing a weapon, lifting up a shield, and even casting spells without interrupting our next occupation.

Let's start with describing the problem

So here we have a clean design for a character controller. It is a SM, it's pretty powerful, and it has nice pipelines established. Any move the character can make is a separate state, a separate code piece, nicely encapsulated to minimize systems complexity.

And now we need to lift our shield and block some hits.

• Well, easy enough, just have an animation and damage stamina instead of health.
• But the next thing we will want from our character is to walk while blocking.
• Now imagine for a second that we also can run while blocking, crouch while blocking, and why not fall?
• Does a single action of blocking something really need to force us to create five almost identical states?

And this is a common task to solve: any weapon sheathing and withdrawing, some reload animations, consumable usage animations, and all horseback combat.

All that requires us to think of our torso as of an entity different from our legs.

Our task breaks down into two big sub-goals:

• what abstraction to choose to implement our idea
• what practical Godot solutions we will use

Considerations

What we essentially try to achieve is a parallel work of two codependent SMs with a shared blackboard.

But then the first problem comes: our system is very closed.

• Imagine a shooter game where you turn with mouse movements, shoot, reload, throw grenades. Titanfall family even adds some parkour to that.