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Hello everyone!
I have a question for you all - about how to program and implement a character's animations. I just counted, and right now I have approximately 30+ animations that my character could be doing, such as walking, running, jumping, etc ("Animation Type")

What is the best way to determine which animation should be playing at a given moment? I have nothing programmed so far.

However, I do have all of my animation data stored into a flat-file.

An animation is assigned to one "Actor", or a character in the game
An animation has a start frame and an end frame
An animation has its own definable FPS
An animation can be set to loop or be played once
An animation can be set to a certain priority level
An animation has an "Animation Type", which is one of 30 values

So, a walking animation would have lowest priority and could be looped; any animation of higher or equal priority could interrupt it. However, an animation of lower priority would NOT play.

Or lets say, the character falls off a cliff. When they hit the ground, I'd like to make sure that they complete the full 'splatting against the ground and getting up' animation before they can start walking again, and thus that animation would have a higher priority than the walking one.

Overall, in order to set and apply animations, it needs to be incorporated into my overall character controller. But I'm not sure how, exactly. I think I have this thought through well, but I'm kinda hazy on implementation.

Any thoughts? Sorry if this has just been a huge ramble :3

You use them based on input or AI actions.

DBP animations are simple, there are no physics bodies used for blending animations like with more modern engines.

All animation can be looped...walk, run , shoot , jump etc. You can use them depending on the situation as Greenster say. I prefer to have all animation in the same object, but you can have the differents animation in different objects and just append object animation to your object...it means that you just use the new animation in your object (I guess you know that ).

Cheers.

I just do this just by normal coding.
So if key is pressed then check if you have correct keyframe(s) to execute the action.
Enhanced Animations are really a must buy for this, you can actually blend animations and do a lot more with the with it.

I store important keyframes in arrays, so I can use them in code:
Like:

These are just the keyframes of the piled animation in 3ds max.

Another thing for example:


For checking keyframes specific keyframes I also use function

Looks messy, but it just checks if current hand frame is a specific keyframe and the funtion will return 1 or 0, whether hands are free to perform that action or not.

You can also check if animation is playing when you need to perform specific action, like the walking. Character can't walk unless the frame is 0 or something another specific keyframe. If it's not, then you can't do the action.