For easy simple games, you can do without using Mecanim and instead just do it through Scripts?

I’m doing a game with animations.
it’s simple FPS but i’m not trying to make great physics or effects or nothing like that.

just character does things , interacts with enemies, they get their anmations changed by being hit or whatever. Or they change their animations at random as they move in the world and as they try to do things(like attack you).

I’m sure i can just do that AI in scripts.

So i can do it without ever using Mecanim?

mecanim just seems complicated to learn and i’m a newbie and i’m just getting the hang of scripting. it’s cool and i’m gettng beter at it.

Yes.

Look at Unity - Scripting API: Animation and the first introduction link. For example, animation.CrossFade("walk"); will play the walk animation, auto-smooting away from idle over a few frames (and is safe to call whenever speed>0 – it knows not to restart if it was already playing.)

I think you have to set the importer to Legacy animations, but otherwise things seem about the same.

Mechanim is mostly just a GUI built on top of the older animation system. It’s running some of these older commands for you, so even if you do learn it later, knowing the older system should help.