Problems with crouch and custom platform movement

[Shawn]

Well I've been fiddling around more with DavidN's tutorial on custom platform movement. Everything is working fine, I'm trying to get crouching to work and still have deceleration in the movement. If I set the horiz or x velocity to 0, then crouching down works fine but the player stops instantly without any slide/skid. If I don't set the value to 0, then the player keeps moving left or right if crouching and holding the left or right arrow. Any other attempt at restricting the horizontal movement I've tried hasn't been successful. I've tried adding a condition to holding down the right or left button to check if the player isn't holding down, but they still moved while crouching anyway. Why this didn't work I'm not quite sure.

Anybody know how I can go about having the player stop moving while crouching, but still slide with deceleration?

[Shawn]

Here's a pic of my events. In these events I tried using Flag 2 for restricting the movement, but that did not work. Before, I tried "X While Moved Down" (negating the down movement). That didn't work either

Edit forgot to include the crouch down commands in the screen crop. I have it so that while you're holding down, Flag 2 is turned on, and when holding down is negated, Flag 2 is off.

After more investigation, the specific problem seems to occur if you are moving left or right, and hold down while still holding left or right. It plays the crouch animation, but does not stop the horizontal movement. It seems as if holding left or right and then pressing down, while registering for playing a crouch animation, does not register in the horiz/x velocity movement conditions. The only thing I can come up with is that for some reason, holding the directions together doesn't switch the flag on. And I've tried checking Down+Right and Down+Left. Still no luck.

[DavidN]

You prevent X Velocity from being altered while holding down Down to crouch (that is, when internal flag 2 is on), but X Velocity still has a non-zero value even though it's not being altered. "Pressing down, while registering for playing a crouch animation, does not register in the horiz/x velocity movement conditions" is exactly what's happening, because that's what the events list tells it to do!

You might want to add alternative events for decelerating while Down is pressed, also not allowing the X Velocity getting further away from zero than it already is. Something like:

+ X Velocity is greater than 0
+ Internal flag 2 is ON
-> Set X Velocity to X Velocity - 0.5

And a similar event for heading left.

When building a movement with a lot of different modes like this, the conditions quickly multiply to become very difficult to manage - it's difficult to keep it watertight and have an event for every situation unless you plan ahead very carefully.

[Shawn]

Okay it's working now! Thank you very much. I added the events you listed and I can get it to decelerate while crouching.

I appreciate the help. Where I was going wrong was for some reason I was thinking that merely stopping the Left or Right direction would fix it, and not thinking to alter the X Velocity itself. Doh!