Events and other properties won't work properly on Sequencer

Hi, we are working on a project that uses Sequencer intensively, as we have a lot of animations in-game controlled by Sequencer. The user can scrub through time with the right stick, forwarding and rewarding all the animations in the level at all times.

We have 3 different problems right now with Sequencer as it is:

1- Events not firing: We don’t “play” sequencer, rather we scrub at the new position of the animation at every tick, and we can go forward or backwards depending on user input.

When doing this, events are not fired. They are in Matinee, so by now we have to keep using matinee for the events track, as they fire correctly there. Would be great to have Sequencer work just like Matinee on this subject, firing events properly when we teleport to a different time even if we don’t specifically play through the event key. Matinee also has the option to note if we want events to be called when playing forwards or backwards.

2- Certain properties won’t work as well. I have a tree with a particle system in it, set to “auto activate”, then I add a “Activate/Deactivate” track into Sequencer to determine when the particle system should be active or inactive. It doesn’t work, nor in the editor nor in game mode.

3- Objects can’t be rotated using quaternions, which makes rotating things like directional lights a nightmare. For this, we keep using Matinee for elements that need to rotate using quaternions.

Sequencer is much better than Matinee in many aspects, but it feels like there’s a lot of work still pending and it forces us to keep parts in Sequencer and parts in Matinee, which is definitely a bad solution.

Hey Drekkard,

Thanks for reporting these issues.

  1. Can you show me how you’re controlling them so I can make sure I’m reporting them in a way that covers your use case? Screenshots or even an example project would be awesome here.

  2. We’ll probably include this in the report for the event track as I believe they fall along the same line with their track types.

  3. This is on our roadmap, see UE-22228. Was reported for cameras, but the fix will be to add Quat rotation options to rotation tracks.

We’d definitely like to address any runtime/gameplay concerns with sequencer.

Hi,

We have not heard back from you in a few days, so we are marking this post as Resolved for tracking purposes. If you are still experiencing the issue you reported, please respond to this message with additional information and we will follow up.

Hi , thank you for your reply. I’m sorry to answer so late.

1- We have a C++ class that moves all sequencers to the target time position at every tick, as we play with time in our game. Events are not fired. Unfortunately I can’t send you a project right now.

2- I found ways to workaround the activation/deactivation of particle systems by blueprint, so this is not a big deal right now for us, though I get others will have the need.

3- Would be great if quaternion rotation could be activated for any actor transform, not only for cameras, as we animate lots of rocks with sequencer/matinee and rotating this elements without quaternions is a big chore, we’re using matinee for those elements by now.

Hey Drekkard,

To be honest, this is the first time I’ve heard of anybody trying to use sequencer in this way. Maybe it just hasn’t come up yet, but can I ask why you’re using cinematic tools for gameplay animations instead of an AnimBP? I just want to understand why you’re trying to use the cinematics tools like this. I don’t know what kind of priority a bug report is going to get for this without me making a case for it.

While we are aiming to reach matinee parity, this may not have been a “feature” that was intentionally part of matinee’s functionality.

Hi , we’re working on a game in which you can scrub through time with the right stick.

Imagine rocks crumbling down a hill, and you can scrub forward/rewind at will, even at slow motion. Using Sequencer is great because we can animate the rocks there and we can have a general view of all the elements moving around and adjust them easily for gameplay reasons (jumping from one rock to another, using falling rocks as lifts when moving in reverse, etc…). The fact that it all affects gameplay is key, because the game designer can do small tweaks to all the moving pieces easily without needing the support of animators or having to update animations one by one. Designing and testing gameplay is great using Sequencer for this purpose.

On other scenarios, we use sequencer to tween the value of a parameter through time on certain objects, and all the logic is in those object BPs, and it works wonders.

We didn’t find a better workflow for all this, considering we are a small team and having Sequencer/Matinee tracks is a great reference for playing with time, we can set a lot of parameters of different objects there and scrub through it and it works great for most of the features. I know what we’re doing is rare, but it works quite well.

You had noted this in the original post:

firing events properly when we teleport to a different time even if we don’t specifically play through the event key

Are you saying that you skip from one position (frame) to another and want the event to fire anyways? I just want to be clear on everything you’re requesting.

I understand your case of scrubbing through time firing events. I’ll be feature requesting that as well as the forward/backward option for events. Also the #2 request.

Thanks for explaining your setup, that provides some clarity for me to make an argument for it. The better the case for any feature request, the better chance it has to get implemented.

I do want to note that these request still may not be implemented anytime soon. I know you’re using matinee right now, but for the time being, it could be more beneficial to create your animations (i.e. rocks falling) in Maya/Max/Blender and import them as skeletal animations. I know it sounds like a pain, but using notifies for these events sounds like a cleaner option than matinee/sequencer when it comes to gameplay. You can also modify animations in the editor by keying bones in the Persona animation editor, perhaps alleviating some of the issues of having your animators fix it. That’s my two cents, anyways.

Hi , yes, we set a new position in the sequencer for each frame, and want to fire events forwards and backwards, Matinee does it but Sequencer not yet.

About animating rocks, we wanted to rule out external programs because there are lots of moving elements that have impact on gameplay and we want the game designer to be able to change them quickly on the fly. Doing it with the Persona editor sounds promising, but then I fear we could miss the overall view of the scene, with different rocks moving at the same time. We will investigate further this road, though, so thanks for the tip!