Hi, I recently made three animations (Idle, Walking, and running) for my FPS game and need help adding them to my movement script. I’ve watched a ton of YouTube tutorials on it and I can never do it right because my movement script is different from there’s. In the code I have now, you can change from the walking animation to the running animation perfectly fine, but I can’t get the walking animation to switch to the idle animation. Btw the running animation also constantly runs unless you are sprinting.
Here’s my script:
using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;
public class PlayerMovement : MonoBehaviour
{
//Variables
public float walkSpeed = 12.0f;
public float speed = 6.0F;
public float jumpSpeed = 8.0F;
public float gravity = 20.0F;
private Vector3 moveDirection = Vector3.zero;
public float sprintSpeed = 14f;
private Animator anim;
void Update()
{
CharacterController controller = GetComponent();
// is the controller on the ground?
if (controller.isGrounded)
{
//Feed moveDirection with input.
moveDirection = new Vector3(Input.GetAxis(“Horizontal”), 0, Input.GetAxis(“Vertical”));
moveDirection = transform.TransformDirection(moveDirection);
//Multiply it by speed.
moveDirection *= walkSpeed;
//Jumping
if (Input.GetButton(“Jump”))
moveDirection.y = jumpSpeed;
}
//Applying gravity to the controller
moveDirection.y -= gravity * Time.deltaTime;
//Making the character move
controller.Move(moveDirection * Time.deltaTime);
}
First, understand how animations are triggered. In a blank fresh script, make and control an animator hooked up to animations and use the standard Mecanim named properties to control the animation. Understand that COLD. Just put your stuff aside and go to it.
Now, once you understand that, you can reason about how to interleave it into your code above. It’s literally going to be either one or two call sites, but you have GOT to understand how it works otherwise it’s just someone else writing your script for you.
Not only that but there WILL be scene setup, so code alone is useless. The code has to be 100% correct, but it has to be set up as well, and that is more than half the problem, and why understanding tutorials is critical. See below.
Beyond that, when things still don’t work, what is often happening in these cases is one of the following:
the code you think is executing is not actually executing at all
the code is executing far EARLIER or LATER than you think
the code is executing far LESS OFTEN than you think
the code is executing far MORE OFTEN than you think
the code is executing on another GameObject than you think it is
To help gain more insight into your problem, I recommend liberally sprinkling Debug.Log() statements through your code to display information in realtime.
Doing this should help you answer these types of questions:
is this code even running? which parts are running? how often does it run? what order does it run in?
what are the values of the variables involved? Are they initialized? Are the values reasonable?
are you meeting ALL the requirements to receive callbacks such as triggers / colliders (review the documentation)
Knowing this information will help you reason about the behavior you are seeing.
You can also put in Debug.Break() to pause the Editor when certain interesting pieces of code run, and then study the scene
You could also just display various important quantities in UI Text elements to watch them change as you play the game.
If you are running a mobile device you can also view the console output. Google for how on your particular mobile target.
Here’s an example of putting in a laser-focused Debug.Log() and how that can save you a TON of time wallowing around speculating what might be going wrong:
Tutorials are a GREAT idea. Tutorials should be used this way:
Step 1. Follow the tutorial and do every single step of the tutorial 100% precisely the way it is shown. Even the slightest deviation (even a single character!) generally ends in disaster. That’s how software engineering works. Every single letter must be spelled, capitalized, punctuated and spaced (or not spaced) properly. Fortunately this is the easiest part to get right. Be a robot. Don’t make any mistakes. BE PERFECT IN EVERYTHING YOU DO HERE.
If you get any errors, learn how to read the error code and fix it. Google is your friend here. Do NOT continue until you fix the error. The error will probably be somewhere near the parenthesis numbers (line and character position) in the file. It is almost CERTAINLY your typo causing the error, so look again and fix it.
Step 2. Go back and work through every part of the tutorial again, and this time explain it to your doggie. See how I am doing that in my avatar picture? If you have no dog, explain it to your house plant. If you are unable to explain any part of it, STOP. DO NOT PROCEED. Now go learn how that part works. Read the documentation on the functions involved. Go back to the tutorial and try to figure out WHY they did that. This is the part that takes a LOT of time when you are new. It might take days or weeks to work through a single 5-minute tutorial. Stick with it. You will learn.
Step 2 is the part everybody seems to miss. Without Step 2 you are simply a code-typing monkey and outside of the specific tutorial you did, you will be completely lost.
Of course, all this presupposes no errors in the tutorial. For certain tutorial makers (like Unity, Brackeys, Imphenzia, Sebastian Lague) this is usually the case. For some other less-well-known content creators, this is less true. Read the comments on the video: did anyone have issues like you did? If there’s an error, you will NEVER be the first guy to find it.
Beyond that, Step 3, 4, 5 and 6 become easy because you already understand!