Animation trouble

Alrighty well it looks like I need help again.

Ok so I have an animation - of a ship. And it just has the default animation, no attacking animation. I want it to always look the same. Instead of attacking through the coldstone engine, I have a rigged set of events. I know they work because I used to have it perform them when I had an attack animation. It looked exactly like this one but was attack instead of default.

Anyway when I run the game, the NPC neither runs the events or animates. He is supposed to have a moving animation, but instead he moves around as the first frame. I don't know why.

Although wait. I just thought of something while writing this. If the NPC moves very often, and constantly changes direction, would it only hit the first few frames off each direction? Because the first few frames are the same...

If you don't have an attack animation, Coldstone will not run it. If your NPC's stamina is 0, he will not attack. So no worries there.

The animation needs to be looped eight times. Your ship will be whatever graphics you have in the loops. If it's the same at the beginning all the time, then it'll look the same. You also need to check to make sure that 8 directions is checked. It's important that when you build your animation that you loop in order from top to bottom. I don't know why; I only know that it can have problems if you don't. You probably know this, but since I can't see your animation, I can't help you more than this.

Hey sorry, I obviously wasn't very clear.

I have an animation that looks like this Picture_3.png (20.6K)
Number of downloads: 47. The first 7 pictures are the same to keep time. Then on the 7th frame it launches this event. Picture_2.png (3.14K)
Number of downloads: 46 Then the animation starts changing. Finally it goes back to those first frames again.

Each direction looks exactly like this. And I was wondering:

When I place the NPC on the map, it moves around but the animation never changes. It just stays on the first frame forever. (it looks like this:) Picture_5.png (1.25K)
Number of downloads: 46

But it does move around. The only thing I could think of is that since it takes so long before the frames start to differ, could it just be that it changes direction, and thus restarts the animation, before it can start to change to the different frames?

Does that even make sense?

I'm sorry but I can't see the graphics. They enlarge, but are blurry. You seem to have made them as movies. Do you have Snapz Pro 2? It's really quite useful for making graphics and you can take a picture as a jpeg.

Anyway, I'm sorry but I don't understand what you're doing. Sometimes unchecking and unlooping and then rechecking and relooping from top to bottom helps.

well i'm not really sure what i wanted was possible, with this game I was trying to push the limits of Coldstone to not make just an RPG game. Oh well....

Thanks for your help though.

-Pixor

No, you can do this. I'm thinking it's an arcade type of game.

Make your ship NPC with several different animations. Forget about the directions. Place the NPC inside blocked access tiles so it can't move. Make the movement at 0. The movement seems to be in the animation. In the animation window, make sure you have the collision sphere "follow" for all of your animations. Make sure that no animation is looped, and that the last frame is set on random.

Your "hero" is either white so you can't see it, or a bar or something so you can see it. On your map, which is very carefully the same dimensions as the inside dimensions of your main interface opening, make the access tiles open side to side so your "hero" can only travel side to side.

You could try making a range weapon that launches via an event within the NPC animations. It would also be an animation that would go straight down, with the collision sphere at "follow." Your weapon would be similar except it would go straight up.

This is where I would start.

Think out of the box.

well your close. Actually its a first person in-cocpit shooter.

The player animation is a crosshair that moves around as if changing the aim. The enemies look like ships that are facing you.

Everything is finished, but I decided I didn't like part of it. What I had done was make a default animation of it flying around (flying is just a frame of it facing you repeated over and over), and an attack anim of it charging and firing lasers. I then had a set of events that made it so that if you didn't hit the dodge button before it finished firing, you would be hurt.

Unfortunately, this meant that they followed the character and attacked it. Which doesn't make sense if the character is really just a crosshair.

So I tried to change it.

I set the default anim to the same as the attack one, but left a large space of flying first.

So what I ended up with was:

Frame 1 (facing you)
" "
" "
" "
" "
" "
" "
Frame 2 (Firing Start)
3
4
5
6
7
Frame 8 (Firing End)
Frame 1
" "
" "
" "
" "
" "
" "
(Repeat for other directions)

So this should leave me with an animation that allows the ship to fly around looking like Frame 1 for a while. And then after a period of time, change to it firing its lasers, and then show more flying.

Now to the problem. Instead of that, it just flies around like Frame 1, never changing.

Which brings me to my original question. Could it be that since it moves so fast, it changes direction and resets the animation before it has time to change to the firing animation?

To directly answer your specific question: No.

At the bottom of the animation window, you can click a button to open a NEW window in the same animation (I'll call a sub animation). See the manual. Coldstone reads the sub window as the attack animation. So place your second animation (Firing start to firing end) as a sub animation. And delete the firing animation from your default window.

Unless you have a sub animation, the NPC will not run any animation when he attacks. Good for friendly NPCs, but not for attacking NPCs.

Think long-range. Use range weapons to attack and manipulate what the range weapons do, animation-wise. Also think of the Player in long-range terms. You can make your crosshairs quite far away from the Player base. The NPC is going for the Player, whether the Player's graphic is crosshairs or if the Player's graphic is a sprite. So make the crosshairs graphic with a lot of white space so the Player is actually beneath the crosshairs. The Player is defined by the collision sphere.

I think Debra has the answer in the enemy ship (NPC) part of the sceen although I still don't see why the ship is not firing at you on a predictable periodic basis unless you have part of your animation looped. Perhaps the fired shot is happening too fast to see. While the enemy ship is "sliding" across the screen in an attitude always facing you, to make it look less "static," you might think of incorporating a blinking light on its top or something of that nature.

However, there may be problems with making the player's colision sphere too large if you anticipate having more than one enemy ship flying around at the same time. The crosshair should be selecting which ship you are attacking and the accuracy of your attack depends on centering the crosshair on one specific vessel. With a large colision sphere you may be damaging more than one enemy with your attacks. I'm not sure about this but the damage you do should be related to where the crosshair is centered.

Some ideas you may have already thought of: As the player moves around the map, different constellations would come into view on a layer behind all ships. Have enough of a border around your map which is blocked access so that the crosshair never reaches the edge of the map.