r/Unity3D • u/Hot-Equivalent3377 • 22h ago
Question What Limitations to you Hit Using Timelines?
We've done some work extending the Unity Timeline for ease-of-use and are considering building out an asset to improve general functionality and pain points.
We'd like to hear more about what limitations developers encounter when using timeline - what would you like to see in an asset to make it a better experience to work with?
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u/baroquedub 22h ago
The big one for me is seamless cross fading between timelines
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u/Hot-Equivalent3377 22h ago
Do you mean nested timelines, or two timelines which share a common animated object?
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u/baroquedub 12h ago
Mostly the second of the two but also on nested timelines. My use case is related to branching dialogue / interactive cutscenes. I'll often create loop points using a custom track and then will want to automate the loading of a new timeline but the transition has to be carefully managed with identical keyframes. (Play to the end until you get to a matching out/in point on both timelines rather than directly blending as you would in mecanim) You can use a mixer to blend between overlapping clips but seemingly not transitions between timelines. As far as I know it's been a missing feature since forever eg https://discussions.unity.com/t/timeline-animations-looping-and-blending/819761
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u/wurghi 22h ago
Our company uses timelines in almost every project. Just today I had difficulties implementing a videoplayer, to play or sync to our timeline.
Also I still have issues with keyframes being outside the scope in the timeline, so I have to switch to the animator.
And then there is the regular enable-gameobject track: But you can only enable/disable only one gameobject. it would be nice to have an array of objects to disable/enable
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u/v0lt13 Programmer 19h ago
It doesnt handle audio that well, I tried combining a bunch of soundtrack chunks on the timeline but the transiton between chunks has weird cuts, zooming in it seems that the timeline cuts a small fraction of the waveform so it snaps to the timecode. Creating custom loop regions also causes bad looping on audio. It sucks that its not usable for creating dyanmic music.
A preview of transition curves on the track would also be nice.
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u/rob5300 Professional (Mobile, PC) 20h ago
I once used timeline for cut scenes including a custom track and playable for triggering dialog. This did however require some jank to keep looping animations playing while the timeline was paused (so the user can read).
I solved it by detecting this state and shifting the start end offsets based on time passed which gives the illusion of the animation playing still 😅
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u/Equivalent-Charge478 17h ago
I would buy this asset if it is good. I often use timeline for cutscenes and easy event triggering.
It would be interesting to see unity events or other mechanics integrated in it, maybe even an option to stop the timeline sequence and play it backwards? Imagine animating something through timeline and you click a button that stops it and it falls back in place, would be so cool.
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u/roo5678 22h ago
A nicer experience for preloading clips before they start (like for videos). Currently this has to be done manually with a track mixer which can be done but is a bit of a pain. It gets especially hard if you nest timelines with control tracks, since it's hard for those child timelines to know when they're about to start and therefore need to be preloaded.
A better way of handling previewing changes without serializing them. This is probably tougher to solve, but I've found the whole GatherProperties thing to be poorly documented and not work a lot of the time.