using animation directions

[mobichan]

Hi All,

I am having some new problems using the animation directions and I'm not sure if this is a bug or not.

In the following file:
test file

I have set up the Active with 4 directions (0, 8, 16, 24) each with an animation (loops 2 times). Then I put some buttons that can add/subract values to the animation index and direction.

I would expect this to make the object turn 90 degrees each time I click the buttons, but it only works one time. And I've also set a counter to display the animation direction, but it doesn't seem to work (it sits on 0).

Can anyone shed some light on this? I thought the animation direction system was easy to understand, but the more I try to get creative with it, it doesn't seem to do the simplest things.

Maybe this is a question better answered by the MMF team?

Please help.

Mobichan

[Olivier]

You must use "Direction > Set Direction" instead of "Animation > Change > Direction of animation". Replace the actions at lines 1, 3 and 4.

[mobichan]

This seems confusing since "Direction" would seem to mean the physical direction that the object is facing/moving in and the "Animation Direction" would seem to be a series of directions independant of the objects physical direction. I only think this because you can set them independantly.

Am I missing something here?

[Olivier]

Yes it's somewhat confusing. I'd be happy to hear Clickteam about it.

[mobichan]

Can anyone from Clickteam (sorry, I'm sure you are all busy with the beta) point to a good resource on this subject? Or possibly explain what the difference is between these "directions?"

[Jeff]

Hmmm good point.

At one time I thought we had a separation of the directions.

You could move in one direction but the animation could be using a separate direction. It looks like something is wrong with Animation > Change > Direction of animation

It would be cool to have the object moving in the 0 direction and looking in the 8 direction, so hopefully at some point this can be figured out.

Francois would be the only one to really know whats suppose to be happening here but I think you will need to use the other direction commands.

I don't know if he will have time to dig into this until after he gets done with the blu-ray work he is pretty busy with that right now.

[Joshtek]

Yves, Francois or others can correct me if I'm wrong, but the following is what I know based on past discussions and my own experience...

The two directions are the "animation direction" (what is displayed) and the "movement direction" (what is stored and used for movement calculations). Your problem is that you assume Dir() retrieves the former, whereas it actually retrieves the latter. This mistake is easily made because the "Get direction value" expression was accidentally put under the Animation sub-menu instead of the Movement sub-menu. It isn't simple to move it to where it should logically be without various complications, so the quirk still remains. As annoying as it might be, there is no way to retrieve the current animation direction because it is not stored anywhere (it is usually determined automatically, derived from the movement direction and available animation directions).

Imagine you have an active object with bouncing ball movement. This object has four animation directions set: Up, Down, Left and Right. In the event editor you set the object's movement direction to be right and a little bit up (AKA a direction of 1 in MMF2's directional system). While the object is moving to the right but a little bit up, its animation direction will be as if it were going right. However, if you use Dir( "Active" ) then it will give the movement direction of 1 and not the Animation Direction of 0.

Hence if you set the animation direction through events based on the movement direction, it won't change the movement direction and hence next time you try to move based on Dir( "Active" ) it will give the same result because the movement direction has not changed.

If, instead of relying on the movement direction, you stored the animation direction in the object's alterable value, then it would work as you expect.

So instead of:
* Set animation direction to movement direction + 8

You'd have:
* Add 8 to alterable value A of object
* Set animation direction to Alterable Value A

To further confuse things, there are also angles which are distinct from directions.

[mobichan]

Thanks for the clarification, although that is way more complicated than I would have expected. I am trying to do what Jeff mentioned above, but I keep running into some automated behaviors (like every animation reverts to "Stopped" when it finishes, unless you bypass it with looping the anim) that I am having to manually suppress by using "Change Animation/Change Anim Direction/Force Frame to 0/Restore Frame" commands over and over. Kind of a pain, but at least I have some way of doing it.

It would be great if someone could add this sort of extended functionality for Animation Directions to a suggestions list.

Cheers,

Mobichan