Play animation then continue previous

vbscrub

Hi,

I want to play an animation instantly, then have the character go back to whatever animation they were playing previously. SetAnimation is no good because it won't go back to the previous animation once complete, and AddAnimation is no good as the target might already be playing a long/looping animation so won't play the new animation straight away.

This seems like it would be a really common thing to want to do, but I'm struggling to find any built in way to do it.

This is the code I've written which achieves this, but I just feel like I must be missing some simpler method that is already part of Spine.

bool previousAnimationLoops = false;
Spine.Animation previousAnimation = null;

Spine.TrackEntry animationTrack = spineAnimator.GetCurrent(0); //Get the currently playing animation data

if (animationTrack != null)
{
   previousAnimation = animationTrack.Animation; //Get current animation 
   previousAnimationLoops  = animationTrack.Loop; //Get current animation's looping status
}
          

spineAnimator.SetAnimation(0, launchAnimationName, false);  //Play our new animation instantly

if (previousAnimation != null)  //If there was actually a previous animation playing
{
    spineAnimator.AddAnimation(0, previousAnimation, previousAnimationLoops,0f); //Queue up the old animation to play when our new one finishes
}

Not the end of the world if I have to just do it like this. But it feels weird to have to write 10 lines of code to do something that seems like it would be fairly common and could easily be built in to the API. Hopefully I'm just missing something obvious.

Oh and if I'm not using the API in the intended way or if there's a better way to do things in general than how I'm doing it, let me know 🙂 Only just got Spine a couple of days ago so I welcome suggestions on best practices etc.

Mario

There's no built-in way to do this. But you can also just use AddAnimation() to queue the instant animation, and another call to AddAnimation() right after that to requeue your previous animation. That'd be 3 lines of code 🙂

vbscrub

Maybe I misunderstand how AddAnimation works then, because I thought that would not play it instantly? Say for example the character is currently in a long animation or a looping animation, if I call AddAnimation then the new animation won't play until the end of that original one they were already playing will it?

If anyone else is interested, I've turned my code into an extension method now, like so:



public static class ExtensionMethods
{

/// <summary>
/// Plays a new animation instantly, then reverts back to any previously playing animation once the new animation has completed
/// </summary>
/// <param name="trackIndex">The animation track that will be affected</param>
/// <param name="animationName">The name of the new animation to be inserted</param>
/// <param name="loopingOnly">Only re queue previous animation if it was looping</param>
public static void InsertAnimation(this Spine.AnimationState spineAnimator, int trackIndex, string animationName,bool loopingOnly)
{
    bool previousAnimationLoops = false;
    Spine.Animation previousAnimation = null;
    
    //Get the currently playing animation data
    Spine.TrackEntry animationTrack = spineAnimator.GetCurrent(trackIndex);

    //Only restore previous animations if they were either looping, or were not looping but had not yet completed
    if (animationTrack != null && (animationTrack.Loop || (!loopingOnly && !animationTrack.Loop && !animationTrack.IsComplete)))
    {
        previousAnimation = animationTrack.Animation; 
        previousAnimationLoops = animationTrack.Loop;
    }
  
    //Play our new animation instantly
    spineAnimator.SetAnimation(trackIndex, animationName, false);  

    if ((previousAnimation == null))  
    {
        //If there was no previous animation playing on this track then queue up
        //an empty animation to clear the track (so last frame of new animation does not get stuck on)
        spineAnimator.AddEmptyAnimation(trackIndex, 0.1f, 0f);
    }
    else //If there was an animation previously playing
    {
        //Queue up the old animation to play when our new one finishes
        spineAnimator.AddAnimation(trackIndex, previousAnimation, previousAnimationLoops, 0f);
    }
}
}

So now whenever I want to use this functionality, I can just do this:

Spine.AnimationState spineAnimator;
...
spineAnimator.InsertAnimation(0, launchAnimationName,true);

Its obviously still running the same code as before, but it feels nicer being able to just call that on any AnimationState instance I want now 🙂 Hooray for extension methods. If anyone else wants the same functionality they can just copy and paste that class into their project and it will work straight away.