DialogueBox Layout Animator

Unity Engine
1

Hi everyone !

This is my first post here and I’m French, so I’m sorry if this is not the right place to ask for help.

I followed a tutorial to create dialogues with Unity 2D and Ink. This is the video I followed :

So, basically, I have a dialogue box with a frame which depicts the image of the speaker, and their name. I want to switch the image of the speaker from left to right when the speaker changes.

7684363--960775--upload_2021-11-24_18-32-20.png
7684363--960775--upload_2021-11-24_18-32-20.png891×328 11.7 KB

Everythink works perfectly except for the last part of the video. I created a layoutAnimator with two clips, left and right, and I recorded the animations by moving my frames. Here’s what it looks like so far :

7684363--960778--upload_2021-11-24_18-34-0.png

When I preview my animations, it does exactly what I want : it moves the white frame from left to right.

In my code, I have a method named HandleTags() and everything works perfeclty except for this line :

case LAYOUT_TAG:
layoutAnimator.Play(tagValue);
break;

It just doesn’t do anything, no errors, nothing. Actually I noticed that I could replace tagValue by anything, including a name that doesn’t exist, and I have no errors.

I also tried to change directly the animation with a trigger, but it changes nothing.

I’m stuck with this problem and I really don’t know how to solve it.

Can someone help ?

2

My first thought is that this code is not actually running.

And what is tagValue? Print it out and find out. Have you tried just using the state name string literal directly, such as “Left” or “Right” or whatever you named the states?

When I do it I always just use the state name, not the hash. But I almost always just use Trigger / Boolean properties to make the states change smoothly, but that is not necessary. Your way works just fine.

Either way, here’s some thoughts on more investigation:

You must find a way to get the information you need in order to reason about what the problem is.

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.

Another useful approach is to temporarily strip out everything besides what is necessary to prove your issue. This can simplify and isolate compounding effects of other items in your scene or prefab.

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:

https://discussions.unity.com/t/839300/3