AnimationPlayer de-selecting can cause lost progress for complex animations

[Thumblesteen]

Tested versions

4.4.1

System information

Godot v4.4.1.stable (49a5bc7) - Windows 10 (build 19045) - Multi-window, 3 monitors - Vulkan (Forward+) - dedicated NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 (NVIDIA; 32.0.15.6636) - AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-Core Processor (32 threads)

Issue description

Hello, I specifically signed up for this account because I have noticed that Godot has this feature where animation players need to "connect" with nodes by selecting the animation player first, and then selecting whatever you want to keyframe. We all know this by now, you figure it out pretty quickly when working with the animation player.

But sometimes in this selection process the animation player will randomly unselect itself, the keys will disappear, and then you need to re-select the animation player at which point the skeleton resets and all your progress gets wiped. It is INCREDIBLY frustrating. But also, you're all working hard here making some of the most amazing tech I've ever had the honour to work with. So don't think I'm being ungrateful here. This engine is awesome, and with a background in Bethesda modding, I am blown away by the innovations found here.

My suggestion for fixing it would be to make the animation player more sticky, so that it doesn't unassign UNTIL you pick another animation player. So that as soon as you click an animation player, you'll always be able to keyframe it until you've assigned another.

Not sure how tricky that would be, hopefully it just means rearranging a method or a condition, but I think it would make animation feel a lot more intuitive for those of us who haven't lived under the tyranny of Blender's spaghetti UX.

PS: Also I have a learning disability, so apologies in advance for how I probably missed steps or rules. But I'm telling you, it's a legit bug and I'm doing my best here.

Steps to reproduce

1. Make an animation node and a Skeleton3D node. (or 2D for that matter, same issue.)
2. Build enough bones so you can select and animate them from the list of bones in the skeleton inspector tab.
3. Click the edit mode, start moving stuff around.
4. At some point it will happen. I'm not yet sure why, but it'll just reset it when the animation player is unselected.

Minimal reproduction project (MRP)

MRP.txt

[CreatedBySeb]

I've done my best to try and give a title that is a clearer indication of your problem so that it has a higher likelihood of being investigated. Would you be able to test if this issue still occurs on the current 4.5 beta? Also, do you know if this is a regression or has been the case for a while? (You can check by testing it on 4.3 and 4.2 stable builds)

[Thumblesteen]

I've done my best to try and give a title that is a clearer indication of your problem so that it has a higher likelihood of being investigated. Would you be able to test if this issue still occurs on the current 4.5 beta? Also, do you know if this is a regression or has been the case for a while? (You can check by testing it on 4.3 and 4.2 stable builds)

Thanks for the help, I appreciate that. IIRC I joined just around the end of 4.3, but I spent a lot of time learning other stuff. So I can really only confidently state that it's been an issue on 4.4.

As for 4.5, I kind of skirted around the issue by focusing on sprite animations so now my whole game is kind of committed to an animation system that explicitly avoids skeletons. I'm mostly here reporting bugs for the sake of community spirit. Would be amazing to see how advanced animation in Godot works for future projects, but as of now I figured out a workaround.

[ydeltastar]

But sometimes in this selection process the animation player will randomly unselect itself, the keys will disappear, and then you need to re-select the animation player at which point the skeleton resets and all your progress gets wiped.

The animation resets to the first frame of the track when you select the AnimationPlayer again. You have to insert keyframes so you don't lose progress. 2D has a convenient auto-keying feature that inserts keys when you make changes, but this is not implemented for 3D.

Also, when you run the project, the editor can automatically switch to the Debugger panel. You may be tempted to reselect the animation player node to open the Animation tab again, which will reset unkeyed changes. You can disable this auto-switch behavior with the editor setting debugger/auto_switch_to_stack_trace or just click the Animation tab at the bottom instead of the AnimationPlayer node, so it doesn't reset.

In the end, unkeyed changes can be lost at any time, so don't forget to insert keyframes. This is a universal issue with animation software. I always forget too..

[CreatedBySeb]

This probably classifies more as an enhancement than a bug since there isn't a direct solution, and probably requires some discussion around how to address, so I have retagged it