Tails Style AI?

[IceCreamMan]

Recently, I started work on a platform game (actually a sequel to the first one I made). In this sequel, I wanted to have one character follow the other the way Tails does in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (If anybody's played that). I was wondering how one might go about this. I thought that I could give platform control to both characters to player 1, but then remembered that the characters would act at the same time. What I'd like to do is when the player moves the main character, the following character would do the same action with a delay of 1 second or so. Anyone know how to do this? Thanks

[Viewtiful]

I'm also wondering how this is done.

[Ixranin]

My best guess would be to use an array that stores the x and y coordinates of the player. Every frame it bumps all the values down one row and puts the newest x and y coordinates up top. The following character would then be set to use the x and y coordinates of a specific row of the array. (Say if your frame rate is 60fps, then using the 61st row would have the character follow a second behind. Assuming the array is set to "Base 1 index".)

To make the animations match up too, you could add a third column to the array, assign each animation a value, then use it in the same way as the x and y coordinates. (For example you could have stopped=0, walking=1, jumping=2, etc.) This part might be a little trickier, but I don't know since I haven't tried it before.

[Quinto]

Maybe this could be done with the timeline object?

[Pineapple]

My guess is that in Sonic, Tails had a simple AI that would cause him to jump when near an obstacle or ledge, and move towards sonic when the 2 of them were far enough apart.