Automatized frame loading into an active object

[Colonel_Justice]

Hi there,

I'm new to these forums and wanted to say "Hi!"
Though I've been using MMF for quite a while now and my skills are quite advanced.
However, I'm struggling with a problem at the moment.

In my current project (yes, it's Zombie Smasherz) I coded a level object handler which defines all kinds of attributes of an active object. So this active object can act as whatever it is told (e.g. a door, an exploding barrel, a chest with treasure in it, a switch, and so on).

The level object has two states: activated and deactivated. The state is determined by flag 0. It also has two different animations for the corresponding state. When it's activated, I want it to display an animation which can be 1-200 frames long. The animation frames are stored as PNG images in a folder and are enumerated, e.g. exploding_barrel01.png, exploding_barrel02.png and so on.
I created a loop that loads images into the level object's activated animation. This, however, does not work.
Here's what I do at the moment (pseudo-code):

1.: Start of frame: start loop "load_object_animation" X times where X equals the alterable value "number_frames" of active object "Level Object" (this is necessary to know how many frames are loaded from the files).

2.: On loop "load_object_animation":
For active object "Level Object", load a image from file into animation "activated" of "Level Object" into the Xth frame of the animation, where X equals the loop index of "load_object_animation". With a bit of string trickery, the file to load is composed as follows: "animation_name"+"loop index of 'load_object_animation'"+".png"

In theory I thought this will result in the level object having an activated animation with e.g. 4 frames loaded from the image folder:

exploding_barrel01.png
exploding_barrel02.png
exploding_barrel03.png
exploding_barrel04.png

In practice the activated animation has only 1 frame, and not even that is altered, just the ol' green diamond.

Checked the file name composition, that's working fine.
Are there any pitfalls I stumbled into?
Thanks so far!

Cheers,
the Colonel

[Colonel_Justice]

Fixed it. Thanks.

The Colonel

[Stephen]

Would you be willing to share your solution, in case other users come across this type of problem?

stephen1980

[Olivier]

If you want to load 4 picture files to use as 4 frames of an animation, then the animation must already be composed of 4 frames (default green diamond for example). Check the help file for more info.