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How to port from PlayerAnimator

The basics​

The animations folder was moved from assets/<mod_id>/player_animation to assets/<mod_id>/player_animations late into PlayerAnimator's life, and PAL uses the new path as well.

In PlayerAnimator you use a KeyframeAnimationPlayer to play a KeyframeAnimation, but each KeyframeAnimationPlayer can only play one animation before having to be discarded, so you usually register an AnimationLayer or ModifierLayer to the player animation stack to hold the current animation player.

In PAL you can simply register a PlayerAnimationController and play animations using it, as shown in How to play animations. You can even chain animations so they play back to back using the PlayerRawAnimationBuilder class!

An animation controller can also hold modifiers, so while the AnimationLayer and ModifierLayer classes still exist in PAL, you probably won't need them.

TL;DR​

PlayerAnimatorPAL
KeyframeAnimationPlayer, AnimationLayer, ModifierLayerPlayerAnimationController
KeyframeAnimationAnimation

Modifiers​

First of all, modifiers now give you an instance of PlayerAnimBone instead of various vectors per bone, but I assume you will get the hang of that quickly. :)

All bone names are now in snake case, so for example left_arm instead of leftArm.

There are some other serious changes when it comes to the values in modifiers though, so here is a list:

  • PlayerAnimator uses metres/blocks for body positions unlike all other bones, but PAL now uses pixels for it too, for the sake of consistency.
  • The Y pos axis for every bone is negated except the body bone.
  • The Y and X rot axes are negated for the body bone.
  • The X and Z position and rotation axes are negated for capes.
  • The Z and Y position and rotation axes are swapped for items.
  • All the rotation and position axes are negated for items except the Y pos axis (previously the Z axis in PlayerAnimator).

All these changes are for achieving consistency between how all the different bones operate, more specifically consistency with how they work in Blockbench.