If anybody could provide me some insight into some of this I would be very grateful. Apologize in advance that I don’t have more information about the problem… I’m having a hard time recreating it.
Here is what I know, somebody from our team is trying to make an animation. I created a prefab for them to workout of so that they can send up prefab changes without touching or altering the main scene file. They need to make two animations and the first one worked great. The second one is bugging out really bad.
I do know that I saw this person selecting multiple nodes in the hierarchy at various points and making blanket changes to all of them at once. Is adding the ui opacity component or changing property values such as making multiple nodes have a default value of zero for opacity. At some point our animator was no longer able to enter animation editing mode from within prefab edit mode… he would click enter animation editing mode over and over and nothing would happen. Refreshing the editor did not help this. Closing and relaunching did not help. Was not isolated to his computer because I pulled the branch and had the same exact problem. What we did notice, however… was that he was still able to enter animation editing mode from scene edit mode. As we are tightroping a deadline, I encouraged him to do this for now assuming there was just some kind of bug in the editor…
As I said before, his first animation works fine, but when we try to play test the 2nd animation we run into issues. While in animation editing mode, we can click the play button and the animation plays as expected… however, when we go into the actual live preview of the game the animation does not play properly. We have followed various troubleshooting steps including making sure that the play unload box was checked and that this animation was the only animation assigned to the animation component… when we swapped the animation clip file Out with the previous animation clip… the previous animation clip works just fine. It’s when we try to do this second animation clip that we experience issues. I have even gone as far as Duplicating the prefab and creating a fresh animation clip on it to make sure that a new clip would play. The new clip plays as expected. Drag the animation clip that wasn’t working into the new prefab (which is identical to the first one) once again the animation clip is broken. I have been using this tool for a long time and I have spent the better part of an entire work day looking for any possible things that I could be missing… I have gone as far as to make sure that every single node property is keyed on frame zero so that there is not an issue of the animation starting off from a previous state… No luck…
Here’s where things get really weird… I have a theory that it has something to do with him selecting multiple nodes and trying to apply changes to them all at once. I can’t help but think that the engine is not actually individually applying the opacity component to six different nodes but rather identifying them as some kind of group attaching the opacity component to that group and the nodes within somehow inherit it… Which would make sense why nothing is changing when he tries to play the animation… because if there is some type of hidden group with multiple property settings on all of the nodes in the prefab that he is trying to animate it would make sense to me that his animation wouldn’t be visible because the property values that he is keying are being overwritten by some group property setting that we cannot see in the inspector. Here is some evidence that led me to formulate this theory… we should not be able to add multiple of the same component to any individual node. In fact, when I try to do this I am unable to and I get an error… yet, for whatever reason, almost every single node in this prefab is showing two different ui opacity components with separate values… when we go into the animation editor click on "add property” we only see one ui opacity component to choose from. I am wondering if somehow some kind of bug associated with selecting multiple nodes at once and making modifications to them is causing components to get doubled up and therefore changes made in the animation tool don’t show up in the animation preview, because they are being overridden. For example… if a node has 2 UIOpacity Components, one with a keyed value of 50 on frame 0, and another with a value of 255 in the inspector that we cannot change in the animation editor… then it makes sense that we wouldn’t see the object turn partially transparent, because another opacity component on the same node is resetting it to 255…
I don’t know how the heck this is happening… but here is a picture to prove it… Are we tracking any bugs like this? The only thing I can think of is that it is related to him trying to add components to multiple nodes (or change properties uniformly on multiple nodes) all at once… because Over the last year and a half of me working in Cocos I have experienced some buggy behavior when trying to work with multiple nodes at one time which has led me to make a protocol at my studio where we only modify nodes one at a time… the animator is new and did not realize/see the documentation I wrote about this… therefore they used this workflow. The only thing in the entire scene that is suffering from this bug is the prefab that this animator worked on.
Here are a couple pics… this double opacity thing is showing up on over 10 different nodes… not sure how it happened… but we are experiencing tons of bugs with this one…
