Linking Multiple Objects

Hi there, I have been working on a game for several weeks, it is an overhead scrolling game kind of like Zelda.

Up until now I have had no trouble really, I worked out the characters custom movement and such. I have run into a problem with enemies though. My goal is to make it so I can throw multiple enemies down and they will act appropriately.

The problem I have run into is the animation for my enemies, what I have done is I use just a basic square as the ACTUAL enemy so I can say if this overlaps player, hurt him. This all works fine and dandy but I want each enemy to have a second object, the animation that repeatedly sets it's X and Y values to the ACTUAL enemy and make the actual enemy invisible so it looks like the animation is running around.

But how do I make it so each enemy keeps track of each of their animations whether it says "Hey I'm walking play the walking animation" or "I'm dying" etc. It all works fine for the player animation but that's because there is only one of them. All of the enemy animations are communicating with ones they are not suppose too.

I tried my own custom way to fix this, by saying on frame start that each enemy takes their X value and puts it in a variable then each enemy creates their animation on top of them and then you say like if X value of animation = X of actual enemy then these are linked and to do it's actions. But it had some trouble as it didn't work 100% of the time it had some strange glitches when I walked off screen.

There may not be an easy way out but any help is much appreciated, I'm sure I'll figure it out.

Make the detector square part of the enemy objects' animations. That way during the event loop you can change animation to collision box, test for collisions, then change it back to whatever it was before so the player sees the animations. ;)

Wow nice, well this would work but it would require me to manually keep track of animation frames, unless there's something built in where it can say return to the frame it was at.

Yeah there is something built in. Alterable values. But, sadly this isn't what you wanted.

No sweat, shouldn't be too hard, thanks for the help this saved me hours of coding.

Just thought I'd thank you again =D I just implemented this in an hour would it could have take me days. Woohoo! Works perfect.

Actually I just ran into a strange problem, for some reason it works fine for the the enemy to move and check against walls, but it screws up when I'm testing hit detection between the enemy and my character, Though it shouldn't I have everything set up correctly.

Here's how I have my Event List set up

GAME LOOP-->
PRE-LOOP--> Sets animation to the square
ENEMYS--> Calculates movement
PLAYER--> Calculates movement and hit detection
EVENTS--> Irrelevant
POST-LOOP--> Sets animation back to normal so the player sees it
END

I don't get how the player isn't calculating the hit detection correct, I have an animation that is bigger then the hit detection and for some reason it's calculating the hit detection to that animation. I'm kind of lost anyone have any ideas? x.x

Actually I fixed it, I set it to check for collision in the enemy loop rather then in the player loop and that fixed it, not really sure how that fixes it but I won't complain