I’m a relative newcomer to the game engine, and am reading Mike Pan’s and Dalai Felinto’s book Game Development with Blender. The first exercise is a monkey shark with a simple swimming animation (action), which works with Alt A. In the Game Logic Layout I set up the Always Sensor, the And controller and the Action Actuator as described, and when I hit P nothing happens. I tried his example file and his shark swims OK when I hit P. I can’t see any difference between his setup and mine. Is there likely to be some secret setting on some secret panel that I need to know about in order to get this to work?
If you add a property to the object, integer type. Enable the (i) symbol in the property and then go to game -> show debug properties (ensure that it is checked). Now in the action actuator there is a box that allows you to output the current frame. Choose the newly created property from the box and now test your game. Looking in the top left corner, see if the property changes. If not your actuator, controller or sensor is wrongly setup. Check that your action still exists and when you play it it does what it should. Often you may not have a saved animation, or you haven’t correctly set the start and end frames.
Thanks for that advice. When I run the animation it cycles through the frames in the upper left, 1 - 30. The Frames are set to start 1 and end 30 in the Actuator, which is the range in the animation. I went back to the animation layout and the animation is still there, and plays when I alt-A or scrub the timeline, so the animation exists, I’ve called it SharkSwimming, that’s the action I’ve selected in the Actuator, and no action still in the GE.
Attachments
shark.blend (730 KB)
Ive looked at it and pinpointed your problem.
Its the modifiers on it, place the armature as the first modifier, or apply/remove the Subsurf.
Thank you 
Much appreciated.