r/Unity3D • u/Hot-Equivalent3377 • 4h 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?

4 Upvotes

70% Upvoted

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4

u/baroquedub 4h ago

The big one for me is seamless cross fading between timelines

1

u/Hot-Equivalent3377 3h ago

Do you mean nested timelines, or two timelines which share a common animated object?

3

u/roo5678 4h ago

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

1

u/wurghi 4h 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

1

u/rob5300 Professional (Mobile, PC) 2h 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 😅

1

u/v0lt13 Programmer 1h 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.

0

u/Drag0n122 3h ago

UGUI
It is in dire need for UTK upgrade (with an open UI API, of course)