I've just released a plugin that allows you to design animator assets through a C# interface

Hey guys, I've developed a (non-free) asset that allows you to create animators in a declarative form using C#. This approach allows you to generate an animator using C#, solving common problems such as the need to copy similar transitions many times and the need to hard code things like transition condition values.

Link

Personally I've found this solution saves me hours, but please let me know what you think of it.

Other forum post with more examples

 

Sounds useful. I like the look of the construction syntax you're using, though I'm not a fan of the "_BaseClass" suffix on CSharpAnimator.

I hate using AnimatorControllers at all, but if I had to go back to them I'd definitely consider getting this.

 

Thanks for the feedback! Yeah I admit "_ClassBase" was a pretty arbitrary decision. How come you don't like it? What do you do to get around the use of animators currently?

 

Check his sig! I'm in the same camp, I prefer to build a custom solution on top of Playables rather than using AnimatorControllers at all.


How are you getting this stuff to compile?

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. Animator
3.         (
4.             // This is the root of the graph. Inside of here we can define only layers.
5.             Graph()
6.             [
7.                 // Each layer typically takes a name, and it's often a good idea to define a default state.
8.                 Layer("Base").DefaultState("Idle")
9.                 [
10.                     // States and sub state machines are defined within states. Check the advanced test for how to use state machines inside
11.                     // of layers. Typically a state will take a name(necessary for transitions to reference it), and a motion.
12.                     State("Idle", idleMotion),
13.                     State("Run", runMotion),
14.                     State("Jump", jumpMotion)
15.                 ]
16.             ],
17.  
18. ..etc
19.  

I haven't seen the syntax before. It's really readable, but you've got to be doing something fancy with your graph and layer types. to allow the [] declaration.

 

Just because it's unnecessary. If the class is only supposed to be used via inheritance and can't be used on its own, make it abstract.

The Playables API gives you much more freedom in how you can control animations so I made my own system called Animancer (as Baste said, there's a link in my signature).

 

I was stumped too at first, but it's just an overloaded indexer (the [] operator). They're sort of a mix of properties and methods, and I assume he's using indexers that take params arrays.

 

... That has to be an overloaded index getter, right? Otherwise the syntax would be [Foo()] = bar;

That's crazy. I like it.

 

Yeah, it's a getter and the result goes into the outer method call. Probably the most creative use of C# syntax I've seen and it lets him use "[]" instead of ".Method()".

 

@CSharpAnimator

Also, I'd recommend making your full documentation available online so people can look more into it before needing to decide if they want to risk buying something that might not work how they expect. I used to just upload my PDF manual to Google Drive and put a link on the store page, but I recently found an awesome tool called Wyam which makes it really easy to generate a customisable website that includes automatic API documentation based on your XML comments.

 

Yeah that's all it is. The method(i.e "Transition()", "State()") returns an object that overrides the [] operator, and the [] operator takes a params array and stores it in that object. I think I got the idea for this syntax from UE4's Slate API. I've never used it, but from reading some examples, I thought of this.