Animation Player is called in _input, but not playing elsewhere

Help Animation
1

Godot Version

4.7.2

Question

New hobbyist here! I am building a clone of Pop the Lock. I have a separate UI element for the lock piece, so I can animate it to move up when the player successfully completed a level. This is using an AnimationPlayer to move the Sprite2D node up.

I have tested this by using binding the function update_level_end to a test key, and confirmed that the lock element does move. However, when a player completes a level and I call this update_level_end function from my main script, the Animation does not show up on screen.

I do know that the function is running; I have print statements, and other elements that I turn off visibility, and those are running fine. Only the AnimationPlayer is not triggering. Actually, it is triggering as I can print out the current_animation and see that it is playing “unlock” as I want. But the visual element does not move on the screen.

I expect I am missing something with my understanding of AnimationPlayer nodes. I do have another AP node in another scene that triggers at different times, but I didn’t figure they were causing issues since they are separate and do not talk to each other.

Relevant code:

ui.gd

func update_level_end() → void:
    # Displays level end UI
    #print(‘level end’)
    $AnimationPlayer.play(“unlock”)
    $CounterLabel.visible = false
    $EndLabel.visible = true
    #print(‘hmm’)

func _input(event: InputEvent) → void:
    if event.is_action_pressed(“unlock”):
    update_level_end() # This triggers correctly

main.gd

func end_level() -> void:
	$Lock.update_level_end()
	$UI.update_level_end() # This calls but AnimationPlayer is not animating

Any thoughts why the AnimationPlayer node might fire but not visually update?

Thank you for your help and thoughts!

2

How is end_level() called?
If you uncomment those print statements in update_level_end(), what gets printed?

3

Hi normalized - thanks for the response!

Great question - end_level in main is called when the player successfully presses the player on the specified marker around the lock (that’s connected by a signal). Once the marker counter reaches zero, the level is complete, and end_level gets called. Pretty simple stuff.

func _update_counter_success() → void:
    # Decrement counter, check if marker is done
    marker_counter -= 1

    if marker_counter == 0:
	    print("level complete!")
	    end_level()

The code for end_level is in the first post. That does get triggered - the $Lock markers stop moving, and the rest of the $UI elements also hide as expected. Only the AnimationPlayer doesn’t seem to trigger.

For the print statements - those are printed if I uncomment them. (The other printouts are for other elements.)

Yes!
No…
Yes!
level complete!
level end
hmm
4

Here’s some visual stuff to show what’s happening; it’s just the visual stuff of what I was describing previously. If I press an input key, the top part correctly moves as expected.

pop_top_unlock

5

And when I use this in game at the end of a level, it does not trigger.

pop_end_level_fail

6

Check that some other script is not trying to play another animation or calling stop(). Try to print currently active animation every frame from _process()

7

Ah, that was a great tip! That gave a great clue.

I have another animation that runs when the player marker hits the marker, called “squish”, which is used for a new yellow marker. It’s meant to be used when a new marker is placed, and adds a little bounce to the marker.

In my function _update_counter_success, I had not shown all of the code above; after it checks if the marker_counter is 0 and ends the level, it runs another function, update_counter_success, which has the “squish” animation. When I printed out the current animation, I was seeing “squish”, but not “unlock.”.

image
image276×266 1.76 KB

When I looked at the code, I had set it up to always run the success function, even after the end_level function had run.

func _update_counter_success() → void:
    marker_counter -= 1
    if marker_counter == 0:
	    print("level complete!")
	    end_level()

    $UI.update_counter_success(marker_counter)

That’s me trying to be clever with my if statements. When I added an else to the end, so it only trigger the UI update_counter_success function when the level is not over, then the lock properly moves!

image
image495×703 19.4 KB

So what I have learned from this is:

  • Don’t be cute with my if statements; I implied an else statement in my function, thinking that this was enough, and I was mistaken with that. In this case, it needed to be either/or with this logic, but not both.
  • Checking which animation is currently being player in _process made it clear what was actually happening instead of what i was assuming was happening.
  • If I do want to have multiple animations being triggered by the same AnimationPlayer, I need to prepare the Player to use these and make sure animations are not being overrun to too many plays.

Much appreciated, normalized - thanks for a great first interaction on the forum :slightly_smiling_face: