Rive Events

Access Rive Events in Unity.

DEPRECATION NOTICE: This entire page documents the legacy Events system. For new projects: Use Data Binding instead. For existing projects: Plan to migrate from Events to Data Binding as soon as possible. This content is provided for legacy support only.

With Rive events, you have the ability to subscribe to meaningful signals that get reported from animations, state machines, and Rive listeners, all created at design time from the Rive editor. These signals can be subscribed to at runtime and have a specific name, type, and various custom metadata that may accompany the event to help inform the context surrounding its meaning.

For more on the Events feature in general, check out the Events page in the editor section of the docs. The Event system has also been expanded to support Audio Events to trigger audio to play in the editor and at runtime.

For example, in a Rive graphic simulating a loader, there may be an event named LoadComplete fired when transitioning from a complete timeline animation state to an idle state. You can subscribe to Rive events with a callback that the runtime may invoke, and from there, your callback can handle extra functionality at just the right moment when the event fired.

Other practical use cases for events:

• Coordinating audio playback at specific moments in an animation, see Audio Events
• Opening a URL when specific interactions have occurred
• Adding haptic feedback on meaningful touch interactions
• Implementing functionality on Buttons and other UI elements
• Send semantic information
• Communicate any information your runtime needs at the right moment

Subscribing to Events

When you subscribe to Rive events at runtime, you subscribe to all Rive events that may be emitted from a state machine, and you can parse through each event by name or type to execute conditional logic.

Let’s use a 5-star rater Rive example to set any text supplied with events and open a URL if one is given.

Accessing Events

The following code demonstrates accessing all Rive events reported from an active state machine.

Components

With a reference to the Rive Widget, you can subscribe to the OnRiveEventReported event in your scripts:

...

private void OnEnable()
{
    m_riveWidget.OnRiveEventReported += HandleRiveEventReported;
}

private void OnDisable()
{
    m_riveWidget.OnRiveEventReported -= HandleRiveEventReported;
}

Legacy API

Using the low-level API is no longer recommended. Please use the Component API instead for ease of use and maintainability. This content is provided for legacy support only.

...

foreach (var reportedEvent in m_stateMachine?.ReportedEvents() ?? Enumerable.Empty<ReportedEvent>())
{
    Debug.Log($"Event received, name: \"{reportedEvent.Name}\", secondsDelay: {reportedEvent.SecondsDelay}");
}

// Important! Call `advance` after accessing events.
m_stateMachine?.Advance(Time.deltaTime);

The method ReportedEvents() returns a list of ReportedEvents

Let’s look at a code snippet for a star-rating Rive file. If a reported event’s name is Star, the rating property of type float and a message of type string are retrieved from the event data (custom properties).

private void HandleRiveEventReported(ReportedEvent reportedEvent)
{
    Debug.Log($"Event received, name: \"{reportedEvent.Name}\", secondsDelay: {reportedEvent.SecondsDelay}");


    if (reportedEvent.Name == "Star")
    {
           // You can access properties directly and cast them
           if (evt.Properties.TryGetValue("rating", out object rating))
           {
               float ratingValue = (float)rating;
               Debug.Log($"Rating: {ratingValue}");
           }

           if (evt.Properties.TryGetValue("message", out object message))
           {
               string messageValue = message as string;
               Debug.Log($"Message: {messageValue}");
           }



            /*
            // For Typesafe access to properties, use the TryGet* methods
            for (uint i = 0; i < evt.PropertyCount; i++)
            {
                ReportedEvent.Property property = evt.GetProperty(i);

                if (property.Name == "rating" && property.TryGetNumber(out string ratingValue))
                {
                    Debug.Log($"Rating: {ratingValue}");
                }
                else if (property.Name == "message" && property.TryGetString(out string messageValue))
                {
                    Debug.Log($"Message: {messageValue}");

                }

            }
             */

    }
}

• Properties that can be read are bool, string, and float.
• Access a dictionary of all properties with: reportedEvent.Properties.

Additional Resources

For a complete example see the getting-started project in the examples repository and open the EventsScene scene.