Animation priorities allow a viewer to decide which animation to play over another. The lower the priority, the more it plays, but is overridden by other, more temporary animations. If two animations of the same priority are played together, the LATER TO START animation will be played. That said, you might not notice that your AO will RESTART when you start walking again, overriding another animation with the same priority.
Thus, ideal animation priorities:
Priority 0-1 – Linden base AO and gestures. (No point competing with these most of the time. Easily overridden, as they’re meant to be. There is a possibility to upload 0 and 1 priority animations, but their purpose is beyond me.)
Priority 2 – Animation Overrides. (Will conflict with nothing else except Linden base animations) and gestures.
Priority 3 – Furniture, (inside ‘sit’ objects) animations, dance animations, sits, and long-play looping animations and poses until ‘standing up.’ (Setting AO’s to use priority 3 will require your user to turn off their AO when seated.) (You could set vehicle animations to 3 if you want to leave an option to animate arms for smoking or texting while driving, for instance.)
Priority 4 – VERY AGGRESSIVE. Use only if the animation must play over everything else: Animations that are supposed to override all other animations playing.
Priority 4 is suitable for vehicles (if you want to enforce responsible road habits), gestures, and wearable objects that animate the avatar only partially, such as their arm or fingers. They are “permanent until detached” animations that are supposed to override all other playing animations, even when walking, dancing, or sitting down, such as waving, pointing, handbag holding, smoking, answering the phone animations etc.
BAD SHIT HAPPENS WHEN
Setting AO animations to priority 4 will cause all bag holding and “use while walking” animations, in addition to all other animations, to fail when the AO animation restarts. For instance, you stand and attach a priority 4 teddy bear. It works fine. When the avatar starts walking while holding a cute teddy, the teddy holding animation will drown and play the standard AO animation, ignoring the teddy holder. Priority 4 is as high as the temporary anims can go, so NEVER use priority 3 and 4 animations in your AO’s.
Setting AV-sitter animations to priority 3 or 4 will force the user to turn off their AO every time they sit… That is the way most of them are set, so the battle is lost there by and large.
If you sell sitting animations for both AO’s and furniture with only one priority option, it will cause some issues.
