Animation '' doesn't exist when playing from AnimationPlayer Method Track callback

[elthang]

Godot Version

4.2.1

Question

I’m relatively new to Godot, but quite experienced in C# and have been giving my first game a go. I’ve created a Node2D for handling character animations, which creates several child AnimatedSprite2D (extended by a small script) as well as an AnimationHandler based on a config file for the character. This is working well, but I’m seeing some errors when trying to use callback functions with the animation handler.

I’ve given the AnimationHandler an animation called “Turn”, which scales the canvas when the player changes direction, and calls a method at the middle point to update the sprites, like so

turnPlayer = new AnimationPlayer() {
				SpeedScale = 1,
				RootNode = GetPath(),
				Name = "TurnPlayer"
			};

AnimationLibrary aniLib = new AnimationLibrary(); 
turnAnimation = new Animation() {
				Length = 0.2f,
				LoopMode = Animation.LoopModeEnum.None
			};

int scaleTrack = turnAnimation.AddTrack(Animation.TrackType.Value);
turnAnimation.TrackSetPath(scaleTrack, ".:scale");
turnAnimation.TrackInsertKey(scaleTrack, 0, Vector2.One);
turnAnimation.TrackInsertKey(scaleTrack, 0.1, new Vector2(0,1));
turnAnimation.TrackInsertKey(scaleTrack, 0.2, Vector2.One);

int functionTrack = turnAnimation.AddTrack(Animation.TrackType.Method);
turnAnimation.TrackSetPath(functionTrack, ".");
turnAnimation.TrackInsertKey(functionTrack, 0.1, new Godot.Collections.Dictionary<string, Variant>() { { "method", "ChangeSpriteDirection" }, { "args", new Godot.Collections.Array<Variant>() { } } });

aniLib.AddAnimation("Turn", turnAnimation);
turnPlayer.AddAnimationLibrary("", aniLib);
AddChild(turnPlayer);

The function to play this animation saves a direction to a property, and the callback function simply sets the animations for each Sprite to face that direction

private void ChangeSpriteDirection() {
	foreach (ActionAnimatedSprite sprite in sprites.Values) {
		sprite.SetDirection(queuedDirectionChange);
	}
}

ActionAnimatedSprite then follows some table lookups to pick the animation, and plays it

public void SetDirection(CompositonNode.Direction direction) {
	if (!canRotate) { return; }

	//Update our lookup table with the new direction state
	((DirectionalAnimationTable)actionTable).SetDirection(direction);

	PlayAnimationFromAction(currentAction);
}

private void PlayAnimationFromAction(Action action) {
	//Look up the animation from the table, based on the current action
	string animation;
	float speed;
	if (action == null) {
		animation = actionTable.GetAnimation(actionTable.defaultAction);
		speed = 1;
	} else {
		animation = actionTable.GetAnimation(action.name);
		speed = action.animationSpeedModifier;
	}

	if (animation == null || animation == "") {
		animation = "default";
	}

	//Play the animation
	Play(new StringName(animation));
}

This is, for the most part is working fine. The signals all trigger and the animation plays correctly. However, whenever it’s triggered I get these errors in my debugger. The stack trace shows that the errors are originating from the Play() call in PlayAnimationFromAction(). These errors each show up 11 times, each time my character changes direction, which aligns with my test character having 11 AnimatedSprite components.

While this isn’t impeding the program, it is flooding my error long which I’d like to keep free for actual errors. I can’t find a way to trap these errors since they originate from C++ and don’t seem to come back to the C#, nor is there any noticeable side effect I can look for.

Interestingly, if I assign AnimatedSprite2D.Animation a value just before the call to Play(), the second error doesn’t appear. If I call SetDirection() from anywhere besides the animation callback, it produces no errors at all.

So, the question is: Does anyone know of a way to A) modify my design to avoid this error or B) trap and hide the error?

[elthang]

Answering my own question. While it’s unlikely to help anyone I’ll post it anyway just in case.

In a previous iteration of my code I was using property tracks for each AnimatedSprite2D to change the Animation property on each one. When I changed to using a method callback track, I neglected to clean up my setup and was still creating placeholder tracks in the AnimationPlayer, which were attempting to change Animation to an empty string. Removing these tracks solved the issue.