Dungeon maze game. How to link snapped grid to specific frame of animation??

I have been practicing with this Dungeon generator example called Procedural-Dungeon-Generation-(1st-person-rendering) I cant post the link.

Im making a similar game that is also snapped to a grid and a dungeon style rpg. I want add a hud/ overlay of a animation sprite of an hour glass being emptied as a sort of timer as you walk through the maze however if you if you turn around I want to hourglass to fill back up to find the right way. However I want to animation to only change when you take a step on the snapped grid. So essentially the timer only goes down when you step and there is a next picture of the animation for each step. Is there a way to link each step on the snapped grid to a specific frame of an animation and freeze. Then if you reverse if you turn around you go back in time and refill the hourglass.

Basically just away to link each frame of an animation linked to a specific square on the snapped grid
Whats the best way to do this?

You could link the hourglass to movements instead of tiles,
so that i.e.
if player moves a step ---> add to hourglass

don't get the back-up thing,
when should the hourglass refill?

Let me re-phrase it, I didn't make much sense. Is there a way to link each individual tile to an individual frame of a animation. So tile 1 is frame 1, tile 2 = frame 2. But the animation wont play if you stop on a tile it just holds the frame its on. So tile 1 will only be frame 1 and the only frame 1.

Oh sorry I didn't get it this way XD

Yes there are many ways to accomplish this,
depending on how you create/load your tiles,
i.e. you may want to assign an ID to each tile type on loading/creation,
this can be stored in one of their alt. values
then you can simply set:

always
>>> force animation frame to ID("Tile")

If i had 1000 tiles would I have to manually assign an id every on each one separately?. I want to have a line of 1000 points that are each assigned to a frame in the animation

I wouldn't say "manually",
but it's hard too say "how" without knowing your current setup.

Generally speaking, you should build a tiles database (an array or even a list or internal list could do if simple enough),
a level editor or procedural generator to populate your world with those tiles,
that would take into accouunt the process of assigning IDs

But this is a very wide argument,
you should narow down your actual use to allow for a more specific answer
(i.e. how do you create your levels? manually duplicating tiles on the frame editor?

Fact is, you must tell Fusion, in some way, somewhere, what-is-what,
so that he knows i.e. your tile at X64Y96 is "grass" (frame 2)

The most comfortable way to tell him this, depends on how big your world will be,
how many different tiles you'll have, how many levels you'll create etc. etc...

Lets say I list 500 background object tiles names with a corresponding animation frame number in a spreadsheet. Can i import that in? The player will collide with the object and the animation frame is shown. The animation frame is is not the tile or player.

The reason for this is I want to be able to play slow frame rate animation as you progress around the map. Like the psuedo 3d view in the procedural dungeon generator, on a separate window. I have a sprite of a time lapse of a sun setting. I want the sun to set as the player progress forward.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by VideoTV

Lets say I list 500 background object tiles names with a corresponding animation frame number in a spreadsheet. Can i import that in? The player will collide with the object and the animation frame is shown. The animation frame is is not the tile or player.

---

There used to be an user-made tool for xls importing,
but you'll probably better save your xls in csv format,
and then simply import the csv into an array with a string tokenizer object i.e. at frame startup
(I should have something like that saved somewhere, but it's really easy to do, in about 5-6 events)

Then you may also create your levels in an external editor,
even excel would do,
you can use the spreadsheet grid to place map tiles ids (or unique names)
and then import as above, and build levels at startup, drawing from this precompiled data

If you plan going windows only and like working with structured databases, SQL extension may also help

But there are really loads of ways, so think thoroughfully at your needs and try to find the one that suits you most :)

So what would be in the fields in excel. I mean lets say every tile stepped on in the game displays a picture or frame of animation unique to its tile. In excel I can create the map using the boxes as tiles like WYSIWYG? So I can shape the map visually using excel how it would look. What should I write in the box? The file name of the image? or shall I write the name of the animation with the frame number? If I create a map like this would I be able to import that? Or even better is there any magic click code that can force one frame high lower than the one it is on?

This article by Sketchy/Muddymole deals exactly with this:

http://www.create-games.com/article.asp?id=2260