Godot: Animation resources as references aren't clarified well by the editor at design time

[nobuyukinyuu]

Godot version:
3.1.1

Issue description:
When instancing a scene which inherits from a scene with an AnimationPlayer, any changes to animations and animation tracks will affect all instances, including deleting animations. This also applies to copied-and-pasted animations and tracks across disparate scenes.

This referencing behavior may be considered unexpected to users, as the default behavior of other node properties is typically local-but-inherited and the Animations' appearance as a reference is obfuscated from the inspector view without explicitly opening it from the animation tab. This behavior also occurs when copying and pasting animations across non-inherited scenes, including the deletion of whole Animations and tracks.

I was meaning to post an issue about this a few months ago when I accidentally nuked a few animations in a game jam due to the byRef copy-paste behavior, but this behavior also occurs on testing with inherited scenes.

Possible workaround: Open each animation in the base scene's AnimationPlayer and set its local_to_scene value to true. This workaround has been untested with copy-pasted animations.

[TheDuriel]

Resources are shared by default to avoid unnecessary duplication. Modifying animations at runtime is not something everyone needs, so the vast majority of animations will never need duplicating. I don't think this is a good idea.

You can instead perhaps save your animations to disk (_always_ recommended), duplicate those files. And load them as unique instances as needed.

Or you know... call .duplicate() on them before modifying from code.

[avencherus]

It could benefit from some clarity. The concept of Resources and how the AnimationPlayer manages them is not indicated. I'm still never sure exactly when the Animation has been duplicated or is referenced.

As it is currently, there is a legitimate issue with accidentally destroying work when dealing with Animations.

[TheDuriel]

Resources, an thus Animations are _never_ duplicated unless you do so manually.

@avencherus

Resources are indeed in need to a proper docs page. They are 50% of Godots core architecture (together with Nodes), but few people are aware of this. (Resources can do a lot of cool stuff actually.)

[nobuyukinyuu]

@TheDuriel

I never mentioned this being a runtime issue. This is a design time issue, as indicated with my concerns with how the inspector doesn't make it obvious that an animation is a typical ByRef resource unless you explicitly access it from the animation tab's pulldown menu. Animations themselves perhaps should be visible in the AnimationPlayer's inspector context in the same way as other resources are, with the same context menus.

The problem comes when trying to copy animations over to a seperate player, or alter properties of an AnimationPlayer inherited from a base node at design time. Most users will treat the fields of the animation tab context as overridable properties of the inherited instance of the node/scene (or in the case of copied animations to a new player in a new scene, a duplicate for the host the resource is attached to), not as references to the base animation as they actually are.

This may be two separate problems, but the copy paste issue can be solved with clearer menus (paste reference vs paste duplicate). The inherited scene issue at design time may require changes to the host's inspector context (in this case, AnimationPlayer) to clarify.

[nobuyukinyuu]

The way animations are currently stored in an AnimationPlayer is currently accessed by the end-user through functions and isn't exposed as an inspector property. I'm not sure how the context for this node type works, but some sort of exposed access to the animation list via the inspector seems like the way to go. The less "customized" hacking to the context necessary, the better, since I'm sure there's going to be someone arguing that this is unnecessary duplicate functionality.

Mockup of one possible solution. Shows explicitly in the inspector that Animations are References, important for design-time inherited scenes (edit: Probably better represented with an array of tuples seeing as how Animation resources are not tied to their names in an AnimationPlayer):

Mockup of another (Addresses copying and pasting of Animations in an explicit way as well as allows for duplicate animations to be copied across AnimationPlayers without the hassle of having to save the Resource to an external file):

Clarification can be further improved by appending resource ID information to the animation name in the dropdown, similar to how Godot 3.0 showed a resource number in the inspector context. In both examples, the second animation was made with copy and paste, the third, with Duplicate, with "expected" results:

Perhaps there's a better way to clarify than one or more of these?