Hi i have had this issue for a very long time and can’t believe no one else has brought it up. I cant find anything online or in this forum regarding the issue of the Timeline playhead not moving and playing the scene as a whole.
The fix for this is to simply change the workspace. Whenever i have this issue i just change to another workspace and it then works, however having to do taht each and every time i wish to preview my animations at runtime is becoming impossible, as it requires all the panels to be set up and locked again.
I’m wondering am i the only person experiencing this? I am using the latest version of Unity and this has been happening at least for the last 4 releases. I am using a mix of clips wholly stored within the timeline asset itself and other clips that are clips in tehir own right but imported into the timeline.
Hi David, sorry for not replying… I just seen this response in my spam and have now unblocked. This problem always occurs and is something i believe Unity should investigate. I will upload a video showing the issue as it occurs often.
Regarding your latest response I’m not entirely sure what you mean. I have tried turning on/off preview many times in the timeline and sometimes that works, but most of the time it makes no difference and the only way i am able to run the animation is by changing workspace. I’ll aim to upload the video this week so u can confirm.
If you can answer these questions, it will help us narrow down how that happened, and if it corresponds with another issue that may have already been reported or fixed.
If you have used the Animation Window to edit an Animation Clip in Timeline, then it might be stuck in preview, and be preventing the Timeline from playing because it is still actively editing a clip. If you can tell me if this works to unblock your Timeline, then it will help narrow down the issue.
There was a bug introduced a few months ago where when you go to playmode after opening a clip in the Animation Window, the Animation Window clears its selection but doesn’t notify Timeline that it has done so. The Timeline is expecting the Animation Window to be in charge of the Animation Preview, but the Animation Window is off doing other things…
A fix is coming, but in the meantime, a workaround is to go close the Animation Window and restart playmode. Changing your Layout does exactly that: it closes all open windows and creates new ones.
If closing the Window (temporarily) fixes your issue, then it is likely that it is the same issue. That said, if you report a bug, you will be able to keep track of whether your bug has been fixed, and know where it has been fixed.
I realise after playing back the video i never demonstrated what happens at runtime… but you can take my word for it (or i can upload another vid?) that the playhead remains stationary although any scripts i have in the scene are still executed.
Happy to do a screenshare in Skype/ Hangouts if it will help?
Thanks for taking the time to report this and making a video.
I don’t think a call will be necessary. This looks very similar to another bug that was filed.
The bug number is 1315060. It doesn’t seem to be currently available on issue tracker, but I think it should become available later.
The fix is in a landing pattern, and should get backported to previous versions of Unity soon after
OK so all said and done, i can just leave this down to you guys to fix right? and i can take solace in the fact that it is a bug and not just me being a noob?
I am experiencing the same bug in the latest Unity 2021.1 with Timeline 1.5.7. Closing the animation window did not help. I can scrub through the timeline and see it act exactly as I’d want, but then when I hit Play, either in the Timeline window or in the Editor, it just remains stuck on the first frame. Any ideas?
Probably not helpful, but I am using Unity Timeline 1.6.3 and the only time it lock up is when something errors out with messages in the Console. (Make sure you have the checkbox on to show error messages!)
Suggestion - try muting different tracks in the timeline to see if one of the tracks is causing the problem? Might help narrow down the cause of the problem. For me I discovered Rigged Animation and Sequences don’t play well together at times. Disabling that track allowed preview to start working again when it locked up.
Thank you, I discovered that there was a script not initializing correctly somewhere else which actually stopped the entire timescale, not just the timeline. Solved!
I have this issue and lost a few hours trying to find the solution, in my case the Time Scale was set to 0 in the Project settings… didn’t know how that was changed but settiing it back to 1 fixed the problem.
Thanks AllanRW! I just had the same issue. Thing is, I haven’t touched TimeScale.
The way it probably got set to 0, is that in the previous session, Unity got stuck on playing the game, so I had to kill the process, and then the next time it loaded it was somehow set to 0.
For anyone that still has this problem; my issue was that the timeline end marker had moved to the first frame thus creating a situation like it was not playing since all it did was repeat the first frame.
