Groups, flags, variables: I´m stuck, please help

**Leander** · 8th August 2008, 02:33 PM

I am confused because of all the events in my game. I don´t know how to code a simple condition.

There are different kind of monsters. They all belong to the group "baddies".

1) When the player collides with a monster all monsters should stop. The player should lose 1 life and a hit-animation is played.

2) When this animation is over the player is moved to a starting point...can continue playing...and all monsters should start again. No, not all monsters. The exception is a trapped monster!

3) When the player shoots a ball and a monster gets hit, the monster is trapped. It stops, cannot move anymore and its animation changes to "trapped". After a certain amount of time it destroys the trap and runs around again.

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I know how to get this to work but it is too complicated. The code is not clean but too many events would be needed.

Normally, I would go for: group baddies collides with player => player´s flag is set to something...if the flag is set to it, group baddies stop moving. When the player has respawned all baddies continue moving.

This is easy.

The tricky part is the trap. If I use "group baddies collides with trap => change animation to trapped" it works. But the player should not lose 1 life if he hits a trapped monster. If I use "group baddies collides with player and animation trapped is not playing" the player is still hit because there are members of the group baddies that do not have this animation running (only one member has it).

I cannot use groups with that trap-thing but without groups it is too complicated.

I do not want to go for "if monster1 collides with player and animation trapped does not play" and "monster1 collides with trap". I have 7 monsters so far and would need 7 x 2 events for a rather simple action.

I want to reduce the number of events with groups but how?