Animation and Player Input Issues | Author: Koda Durbin | 7/11/25

The Problem

There were quite a few problems that arose while preparing the beginning stages of Operation Nightfall. From a user standpoint, having visual feedback and the ability to complete objectives is extremely important. The first challenge we ran into was getting animations to sync with the player's actions, specifically walking and firing the weapon. Another issue was getting the pause menu to display when the player pressed the escape key. All of these issues were related to player input, and without it there would be no game to play.

The Solution

Part of the issue with the animations was that they did not match the skeletal mesh of our character. To fix this, we plugged the skeletal mesh into mixamo to ensure the animations were compatible with the character. Next, I checked the project settings to make sure the appropriate input mappings were there. They were not, so I added them and bound them in the correct spots. This allowed the game to know what the player was doing and how to process that information. This is the exact same solution for the pause menu input as well.

Once the inputs were bound, I tested the game to see what else was missing. The walking animation was working at this point, but the firing animation was still not working as expected. It took a while to debug this, but to make sure the animation was not the actual problem, I forced the character to only play the fire animation temporarily. It looked very silly, but the fire animation was not the issue, it was related to incorrect delegate bindings and how the slot animation was being called upon. I fixed the animation delegate and changed a few parameters for the slot animation, and BOOM! The animation transitioned smoothly from walking to firing the weapon with blending, so the player can shoot and walk without "sliding around."