Help with "mixing" animations.

[camelman]

Im having a hard time explaining this so plz bare with me. My character has a set of walking animations, and a set of walking while shooting animations, about 15 frames per. Now if my character is walking and i shoot while still moving, it will play the "Shoot/Walking" animation, but start at the first frame, therefore the legs will bugout. So how do I make the shooting+walking animation match up with the frames of the normal walking animation? Also I need a shooting animation when my character is stopped, without it playing the shooting while walking. The reason this is such a big deal is because my character can aim up/angleup/angledown/and straight, (kindof like super metroid) so while walking i need the transition to be smooth as possible. Thnx for any help

[00J]

You'd have to break him into 2 parts, His Torso, and His Legs.
So you can control both independant of the whole character.

You'll have to put the Hotspot at his stomach area, and adjust it so he lines up correctly.

like this
OutGun




You can also learn to make Arms independant of the main characters body, good for aiming in lots of directions.
It can be as complex as you want, depending on the amount of patience you have.

[camelman]

There has to be an easier way though, All I need to do is for one animation sequence to pick up from the frames of another. I thought it would be really simple. There has to be some kindof action I could do for this.

[dragonguy]

I have an idea, why not create new animations like walk-shoot or run-shoot and put both the shooting and the walking in it.

[Werbad]

I would place my Shooting animations as separate directions in all existing animations, so that shooting animation = current direction+1. Might sound a little complicated but it will solve all desyncing problems if used correctly.

[camelman]

Yeah i've seen the direction thing done in a MMX engine for different weapons, but that was years ago and I forgot the concept lol.

[Chaos]

also, in MMF2 at least - you can save the animation frame to an alterable value, and then when you change animation sequences, tell it to force animation frame to alterable value, and then restore animation.

Thats how I've been doing it, for a system very similar to yours. The only thing you need to make sure of for it to look perfect, is to make sure the walking animatiions line up for both sprites. IE: the legs in walking frame 3 need to be exactly the same walking-with-gun frame 3. so, they all 'line up' correctly.

Hope that helps.

[camelman]

Awesome, I got the animations working, but another problem came up. I used the directions concept to get a shooting animation for everything. Thing is when I let go of the up key, my characters direction is stuck to up. So how do I make it where when I hold up, it angles up, but if im not holding up, the direction goes back to left or right? Ive tried(simplified)

"When pressing up key: set direction counter to 3(upright)"
Then
"(NEGATE)When pressing up key: set direction counter to previous direction" so my character wont be aiming upwards anymore,
But when I do that, the counter jumps to 3 for a split second, then goes to the previous number. For some reason I keep thinking there is some really simple way around this I can't figure out so sorry if its kindof a dumb question lol. Almost done with the engine I just need to figure this out first!! thnx for help everyone.

[camelman]

lmao!! Like 10 seconds after I posted that I figured it out, my bad for making you guys read all that. All I did was when pressing up, set counter to 3, but I changed the negate to REPEAT while up key is being pressed, so it makes sure I wont get stuck facing up. Good deal =P