Read something in Sue’s book thread that was disturbing. Please say Unity isn’t getting rid of the timeline (which is admittedly not much but all we have), in lieu of all things Mecanim? Mecanim is not the answer to all things animation. It’s sorta not the answer to much except for Madden football or some Sports like game.
Sometimes you simply was to rotate scale or move something. God…please let the leave what works alone, and simply augment the product with the over-hyped pink elephant they purchased and must now hawk like a working girl on a street corner.
Vastly more games will be produced and sold without Mecanim than with it… Not everyone needs mocap.
There’s no evidence to support that claim; in fact, all evidence suggests that they realize their existing animation tools (the timeline) are a bit sub par and are working to improve them. I believe this was mentioned most recently in the latest “new GUI coming” hour long demonstration.
The timeline animation editor and Mecanim really have almost no overlap - there’s no reason to suspect Mecanim will be replacing the timeline because, quite frankly, it cannot.
If that’s the quote you are reacting two I think you and the poster (author?) are both misreading the situation, but in different ways.
You seem to be thinking that the legacy animation system the poster is referring to is the timeline, but it’s not. It’s just the legacy method Unity used before Mecanim to import and process animations - and has nothing to do with the timeline-based animation tolls that are part of unity.
The poster seems to be implying that she thinks there will be a day when the legacy animation importer no longer exists, but Mecanim is not feature complete - and I highly doubt this will be the case. If Unity ever drops support for the legacy system (which it may), I fully anticipate it will be after all things currently not possible with Mecanim, but possible with legacy, are added to the API. Maybe not the GUI, but the scripting API so that we can work around the GUI limitations.
Oh I hope my reading was completely wrong. Nothing would make me happier. My thought was exactly the same as yours. They are completely different toolsets. Will gladly eat my hat and the next fellows to be told I’m wrong.
Oh a wholly unrelated note, do you know any good industry meet ups in the area? I live pretty close to you (right by Six Flags Great Adventure) and living around here it feels like a choice between not attending any regular events, or driving all the way into North Jersey or NYC - which is a long way to go for a 1-2 hour long event.
I recall Unity showing that they were working on a NEW timeline editor, much more comprehensive than the animation clip editor, which suggested to me you’d be able to set up all kinds of events and stuff to happen over the course of time in the game, rather than just small clips that you play. Personally I find that one of the hardest things to program in a game is stuff that happens over time or on time, stuff in the future, etc… most game editors have tended to focus on layout - ie dealing with space - what goes where, moreso than what happens when, and ideally I’d like a proper unlimited timeline that covers the entire game runtime and lets you basically build the game structure and launch scripts and move things around and all that kind of stuff usually reserved for “cut scenes”… so that you can get a much better grip on time-based rather than spatial-based development.
What we are deprecating, is the “old animation code”. So at some point in the future, the same animation editor window that you currently have will be creating animation clips that are played back by “new animation code” (we’re calling anything animation related “Mecanim” internally, since that team now does everything related to animation runtime - be it simple animations, retargetable humanoids or anything in between).