How to Hold on Final Frame of Animation in Godot

Question

I am learning Godot 3.0 and I have a question concerning animation.

I have a player object whose node structure is KinematicBody2D > Sprite > AnimationPlayer. In the AnimationPlayer, I have ascend and descend animations that I want to play until their final frames, at which point I want to hold on those frames.

For now, I initiate my animations using the following function, which looks at my player's state attribute:

func animate():
    var animation_player = $Sprite.get_node("AnimationPlayer")

    # image matches orientation
    if orientation == "LEFT":
        $Sprite.flip_h = true
    else:
        $Sprite.flip_h = false

    # animation depends on state    
    if state == "idle":
        if not ["idle"].has(animation_player.current_animation):
            animation_player.play("idle")   

    if state == "run":
        if not ["run"].has(animation_player.current_animation):
            animation_player.play("run")        

    if state == "ascend":
        if not ["ascend"].has(animation_player.current_animation):
            animation_player.play("ascend")

    if state == "descend":
        if not ["descend"].has(animation_player.current_animation):
            animation_player.play("descend")            

I have disabled looping for my ascend and descend animations and yet they still loop. Probably because when their animation finishes, the idle animation starts and is then immediately changed back to ascend or descend since the player is still in this state.

So my question is: How do I go about holding on the final frame of certain animations?

---

I have looked into the animation_finished() signal of the AnimationPlayer, but I can't figure out how to use it properly.

All I can think to do is use a Call Func track on the ascend and descend animations, calling a custom function at the end of these animations which switches to a different, single-frame but looped animation (ascend_static or descend_static). But surely there is a better way?

Answer 1

I think the problem is that you call your animate function in every loop. This leads to a constant restart of the finished loop. If you wouldn't check whether or not the animation is running your animation would restart over and over again.

I think it is better to put the animate function into the setter function of state, which is called whenever your variable is changed. To do this, just add the following line to your script:

var state = "idle" setget state_change

And the function:

func state_change(new_state):
    state = new_state
    animate(state)

The state_change function is only called when the state changes and therefore the animate function is only called once (you also don't have to check for a running animation anymore). Since you probably want to loop your idle animation, you have to make sure that this animation is set to loop.