Emote

An emote is a short animation your player plays when you ask for it: you pick it from the emote wheel, or press a key you gave it. This recipe takes one clip, lists it as an emote in a compat file and gives it a key, so it plays from the wheel and from the keyboard.

It is for pack makers who have a clip and want it on the wheel. The example is Hello, one of the four emotes of the example pack provided by Crafto, Fluid & Foolish, the animation pack behind every Punchy! Moves demo on this wiki.

Before you start

• Punchy! Moves, from Modrinth or CurseForge (Getting started has the steps). Moves ships no clips of its own, so an emote lives in a resource pack.
• A tool for the clip: Blockbench with the Punchy! Moves rig, or Punchy! Studio, from Modrinth or CurseForge. A short clip is enough. If you have never made one, How to create custom animations goes through the rig and the keys first.
• The example pack provided by Crafto, only if you want to play its Hello in game before you make your own.

What an emote is made of

An emote has three pieces, and only the first two are files.

Hello in the example pack provided by Crafto is one clip and one entry. This is its entry, on its own in a compat file:

{
  "format_version": 2,
  "emotes": {
    "entries": [
      { "id": "hello", "display_name": "Hello", "animation": "hello_nleg", "keybind": "H" }
    ]
  }
}

• animation names the clip, hello_nleg, spelled exactly as in the animation file.
• display_name is the label on the wheel and in the key binds. id tells emotes apart.
• keybind is the key Hello starts on, H.

The clip is 1.25 seconds long. The right arm swings up and sways, the head dips and turns a little, and every bone is back at rest on the last key. This is a simplified look at it: two bones out of the seven the real clip keys, with only some of the rotation keys, written as plain values. The real clip also smooths between its keys.

{
  "format_version": "1.8.0",
  "animations": {
    "hello_nleg": {
      "animation_length": 1.25,
      "bones": {
        "head": {
          "rotation": { "0.0": [0, 0, 0], "0.2083": [19.5, 0, -1], "0.875": [-5, 0, 9], "1.25": [0, 0, 0] }
        },
        "right_arm": {
          "rotation": {
            "0.0": [0, 0, 0],
            "0.2083": [0, 71, -5],
            "0.3333": [0, 90, 135],
            "0.625": [-1.4269, 90, 110.1139],
            "0.875": [0, 90, 135],
            "1.25": [0, 0, 0]
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

The clip starts and ends at rest, so the emote blends in from your standing pose and back out to it without a jump. See Animation files for every key of a clip.

Make your own Hello

You will make a clip called hello_wave, list it as the emote Hello wave on H, and play it in game with the happy face. Pick your tool.

Standing still, your player waves and the face smiles. Moving, or doing anything else with the body, ends the emote early.

Video coming soon

Give it a key

The keybind in the entry is the key the emote starts on the first time the game sees it. From then on the key belongs to the player.

• No keybind. The emote is on the wheel only, until a player gives it a key. The tile shows the game’s own text for a key that is not set.
• Writing the key. H and h are the same, and so is the full name key.keyboard.h. See Key names for the list. A name the game does not know leaves the emote without a key.
• A key is made once. The game makes the key the first time it sees the emote’s id and keeps it for the session. If you change keybind and reload, the key that exists does not move, and a key the game has already saved for the emote comes back after a restart too. Set it by hand as below.
• Press once. Only a key press counts, with no screen open. Holding the key does nothing more.

A player changes an emote’s key like any other:

Video coming soon

A key a player sets always wins over the pack’s keybind. When two things share a key, Moves checks the camera keys first, then the wheel key, then each emote in the order of the list, and the first match gets the press. Give each emote its own key. Keys and emotes has the whole order.

Add more emotes and move the wheel

Every entry in entries is one more tile on the wheel and one more key. The wheel shows four emotes a page, with the < and > buttons to turn the pages. menu_key is the key that opens it, C unless you set another. This is a compat file with two entries from the example pack provided by Crafto and the wheel key spelled out:

{
  "format_version": 2,
  "emotes": {
    "menu_key": "C",
    "entries": [
      { "id": "hello", "display_name": "Hello", "animation": "hello_nleg", "keybind": "H" },
      { "id": "dance_emote", "display_name": "Dance", "animation": "listening_song", "keybind": "L" }
    ]
  }
}

• Entries from every compat file and every active pack are added to one list, in the order of the files. Files are read in the order of their full path. When two active packs have a compat file at the same path, only the higher pack’s copy is read, so give your file a name of its own. A pack that lists the same id as another shares that emote’s key.
• The last file that sets menu_key wins. Like an emote’s key, the wheel key is made once per session, so a different menu_key after a reload does not move it.
• A clip can serve an emote and something else at the same time. Dance in the example pack plays listening_song, the clip that pack also uses while music is playing nearby.

Pick the face

face names the look the face plays while the emote runs. Leave it out and the face plays Happy. The name has to be one of the built-in looks written exactly in lower case, such as happy, cheery, sleepy or wink_left. Any other name, a capital letter or a look your own pack draws plays Happy. The full list is on Keys and emotes, and a face that moves during the emote goes in the clip itself: see Faces in packs and clips.

Only your own avatar gets the emote face. In Punchy’s new menu, the Face tab of the Punchy Moves group has an Emotes switch, on by default, that turns the emote look off.

The emote keys at a glance

Most of these keys can also be written under a second name, and the compat files page lists them: see Emotes in compat files.

When an emote plays

• Only while you stand on the ground and keep still. An emote key pressed while you move is dropped, not saved for later.
• Not while the body is busy: mining, attacking, swinging, using an item, jumping, falling, climbing, crawling, flying, swimming or wading in shallow water.
• The clip plays once from start to end, then the pose fades out. That is true even for a clip marked loop, so a long emote needs a long clip. Dance in the example pack provided by Crafto, for one, plays its 1.33 second clip once.
• Moving, or starting something else with the body, ends it at once and the pose blends back to what you were doing.
• Press the same emote’s key while it plays and it starts over. Press another emote’s key and that one takes over.
• Other players do not see your emotes. They are never sent over the network.

Things that go wrong

Things that drop a whole file

The game drops the whole compat file, and every emote in it, when:

• format_version is missing, or is anything other than 2 or "2".
• The root has a key the format does not take. The root takes $schema, format_version, defaults, item_groups, items, empty_hand, variables, cameras and emotes, and no others. A misspelled emote drops the file.
• The JSON is broken, such as a missing comma.

The game writes a line starting with Could not load animation compat to its log and shows nothing on screen. In Studio, the line under the Raw JSON text tells you as you type.

Why my emote does not show or play

Related pages

• Keys and emotes for every Moves key, the wheel and the list of faces.
• Compat files for everything else a compat file can do.
• Animation files and How to create custom animations for the clip.
• Faces in packs and clips and Face reactions for looks.
• Punchy! Studio for Moves packs and Studio: Game view and live preview for watching a clip on your player while you key it.
• Troubleshooting and the FAQ.