Topic: Awkward Transition from Normal to Idle View

[maximusfink]

Hi all, I've been searching the forums and beating my head against my desk all day trying to figure this out. Basically the player character in my game is a robed guy with flames billowing out from under his cloak. He doesn't have a traditional walk cycle, instead he sort of glides around. So my Normal View is his "walk" cycle, which is essentially his robes flowing a bit, and flames coming out of them, but while there is a first standing frame in this animation, it is just a placeholder and not his actual standing pose, which I am handling with an Idle View. In the idle animation, his robes are not flowing but flames are still billowing out from under them.

I've put a line in the Global.asc under the Game_Start function: --->      cCharacter.SetIdleView([idleView], 0);

The game starts and he's standing there looking good and I move him and that all looks fine too, but when he reaches his destination he gets stuck on the first frame of his normal view for anywhere between one or a half of a second before switching to his Idle View, which loops uninterrupted once it gets going. By first frame I mean the standing frame, I know it is this frame because I had it blank at one point in which case he'd disappear before going into idle view.

It looks crappy and I can't figure out how to fix it. As a side question, is there any way to include those first frames of the normal view loops into the animation itself? Sorry if I'm posting too much, thanks for any help.

[Khris]

Don't cross post, people who answer tech questions will look at both forums anyway.

I don't think there's an easy answer here; maybe somebody who's used to browsing the engine source can shed some light on this issue?

[Crimson Wizard]

This may be not easy to tell, since there are many things going on in the engine, but my blame goes for this condition:

Code: C++

1. // count idle time
2.     else if ((loopcounter%40==0) || (chex->process_idle_this_time == 1)) {
3.       idleleft--;
4.       if (idleleft == -1) {
5.  

Doesn't that mean that idle timer only decremented once per second, meaning that if character stopped at 0.001 of a new second it will still wait for the rest 0.999 milliseconds?

EDIT: Probably explained incorrectly. The problem is not that it checks for idle time once per second, but that it makes one extra check if wait time is 0 (it needs it to become -1).

Anyway I don't see how knowing this may help. I guess the animation should be done some other way. What about force-playing animation depending on whether character is moving or not?

PS. We should probably still fix this in future versions of AGS.
EDIT2: opened an issue for later reference: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?issue=341.0

[maximusfink]

I don't know how to access the engine source code and I wouldn't be able to make much sense of it anyway, but (@ Crimson Wizard) what you posted there does explain why the hiccup between views varies slightly so that's good to know. Since that's the case though, I wonder why this problem is encountered so infrequently by people using the idle animation this way. Before I posted the topic I did try to force-play the animation through some scripting in repeatedly execute but I wasn't sure how to go about it, and wasn't sure if it was even possible so I gave up. I'll look into it more though, since detecting whether the char is in motion or not would be a lot more immediate. Thanks for the help guys.

[Alan v.Drake]

Ah, I encountered that issue, but changed the line to "loopcounter%2" so it started sooner. I should have removed that piece altogether so one could directly specify the number of frames to wait instead of seconds, but if you need a quick fix you can use AGS Draconian.

- Alan

[KodiakBehr]

Hey, I hate resurrecting this issue, but I'm in the exact same boat.

I noticed that Dualnames had a makeshift fix HERE, but I can't get it to work properly.

Code: Adventure Game Studio

1. if (!cPlayerCharacter.Moving) {
2. if (cPlayerCharacter.View!=idl)cPlayerCharacter.ChangeView(idl);
3. if(exc!=Game.GetFrameCountForLoop(idl, cPlayerCharacter.Loop)) {
4. ViewFrame*getidle=Game.GetViewFrame(idl, cPlayerCharacter.Loop, exc);
5. cPlayerCharacter.Frame=exc;
6. if (fb!=cPlayerCharacter.AnimationSpeed+getidle.Speed) {
7. fb++;
8. return;
9. }
10. if (fb==cPlayerCharacter.AnimationSpeed+getidle.Speed) fb=0;
11. exc++;
12. }
13. if(exc==Game.GetFrameCountForLoop(idl, cPlayerCharacter.Loop)) exc=0;
14. }
15.  
16. if ((cPlayerCharacter.Moving) && (cPlayerCharacter.View==idl)) {
17.  cPlayerCharacter.ChangeView(wview);
18.  exc=0;
19.  fb=0;
20. }
21.  

I'm not calling the SetIdleView, as instructed, but despite this it doesn't animate at all unless it's in motion.  It just sits there.  Any ideas?

[KodiakBehr]

Y'know what?  Sorry to have brought it up -- I've changed my mechanics somewhat so that the person in question is always in motion, thus avoiding this entire issue.  Disregard.