Player walk animation not played when moving while thread is running

[Rebusmind]

Describe the bug
When the player is moved via an actor move event while also a thread is moving another actor, the movement animation is not played.

To Reproduce
See this script:

When I disable the thread, the player walks normally.

Expected behavior
The walking animation should be played even if a thread is running.

Screenshots
With the thread running in parallel:

Without thread:

Platform (please complete the following information):

• OS: Windows 11
• App version 4.1.3

Additional context
This only seems to affect the player, other actors can walk at the samt time with no issue.

[chrismaltby]

Hi @Rebusmind just spent a little time investigating this, I believe it's caused by the exact same issue as #1644 that you raised earlier. As soon as you start a thread it's causing the script to become unlocked, which is currently needed to allow multiple threads to run at once but has the side effect of causing topdown_update() to run at the same time too. topdown_update() is responsible for moving the player when your press input (what you saw in 1644) and also for stopping the player animation when no input is pressed (the issue you're seeing here)

To me it seems like there needs to be a way for switching between

• Only one script runs at once
• Multiple scripts can run but the game update function doesn't run (<-- this isn't possible now)
• Multiple scripts and game update function can run simultaneously

Or something that ends up with a similar result. I'll need to have a think how best to achieve this and how to not break any existing projects in the process.

[Rebusmind]

That makes sense.
Maybe threads could have a checkbox for this titled "Disable player input"? Might be too abstract, though. And it would have to work with every scene type.