I’ve made a character animation using armatures, but I can’t seem to get the animation to play when I start the game. In fact, the game engine ignores armatures completely - when I press ‘P’ it goes back to the original pose, before I added armatures.
Are armatures not intended for use with the game engine, or is there something I’ve missed?
P.S. Sorry if this is a double post, my internet stuffed up and it didn’t seem to post the first time.
Have you used the search function to see if that will get you any answers?
Have you parented the object to the armature?
Maybe a .blend?
I may be confused and thinking about a limitation that an old version of the GE had, but I thought meshes had to be divided in to their working parts (torso, legs, arms, head, etc.) in order to be animated in the GE.
Nope, you use Vertex Groups and assign the vertices of the arm to the arm bone etc.
If you’re using the 2.40 version, the armatures won’t work.
envelopes don’t work yet, i think, in case you’re using them… Also, make sure you’re using the action actuator on the armature, with all the appropriate settings, etc.
a .blend would be greatly helpful in helping this problem
I did a character animation for a game test a long time ago. A few of you might have seen it already ages ago when there was a blender game engine character contest, but still a nice resource of character animations.
Right now envelopes are not supported, so what you do is creating the armature and assign every vertices to a bone by creating a vertice group with the exact same name as the bone you want to parent it to. Then assign and those vertices will deform by that bone. Now do this with all the vertices of your mesh.
Afther that, just animate your armature like you want, and use actions actuators to play your armature animation.
Here an old character I animated, press W for an walking animation and just wait for a idle animation. 
http://stud.cmd.hro.nl/0775659/various/blender_ge/teddy_packed.zip
I couldn’t see much (if any) difference between mine and the teddy thing.
EDIT: Okay, I can’t post attachments for some reason. So I don’t know. I put the animation on the action editor and did the action actuator, but that didn’t work either. I’m using version 2.42a, by the way
Okay, I’ve noticed with all the examples of walk cycles that actually work, the Armature modifier as something about “Make modifier real”… what’s all that about?!
No idea, I’ve never used it and i can get my characters to animate fine. maybe you should upload your .blend to like SaveFile.com or something so we can have a look at it.
I think it’s got something to do with the armature modifier… what does that armature modifier that says “make modifier real” mean? And how do I get it?
Ctrl-P invokes a Parent/Child relationship, but it also creates a Modifier flag. If you “Make Modifier Real” you change the Ctrl-P relationship to a real Modifier. This changes certain things; two I can think of off the top of my head are a) Shft-Ctrl-P (or Alt-P >> Clear Parent Inverse after Ctrl-P which does the same thing) is not available thru the Modifier and b) Envelopes (which I don’t believe work in the GE anyway) will not be able to access Bone Weights (not weightpaint) thru a Modifier.
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That fixed it! Thanks a lot, Fligh.