It turns out that my animations actually were not working correctly on my secondary test machine.  I’ve fought with this for days at this point and I’m ready to just give up on that other machine as a testing platform, but I’ve found something interesting in the process.  It appears that my other machine doesn’t like big numbers.  That makes no sense to me but here’s what was happening.  When I created a test scene with the animated character at (0, 0, 0) the character displayed and behaved fine.  However, when I moved the character and the camera to a far flung location, like (130560, 2, 130560) he suddenly disappeared.  No errors or any other indication anything was wrong, the character was just not there.  Again, this only happened on my lower-powered test machine.  On my main development machine the character shows up just fine at that location.  It’s really weird.  I’m going to create a test suite to see if I can isolate this issue further, but not right now.

The other slightly problematic thing I’m seeing at this point is a little bit of jitter in the character while an animation is playing.  It’s not huge but it seems to get worse the more loops through the animation plays, and was much more pronounced on the secondary machine.  I’ll need to do some digging on this but I may skip it for now just to keep moving forward with the project as a whole.

Next up is creating a simple attack animation then getting some enemies to walk around in the world.