Need help with character animating (SOLVED)

[rich]

Okay, I have created a character, that for the majority of my game is simply sitting in the background enjoying a cigarette. But, he does walk in one of part of the game. So, I set his normal view to walking.

While, he's sitting, I created a view of him holding his cigarette with smoke just coming off of it. I set this view to the idle view. Then, in the script I set the idle delay to 0. Now, I've also created a view of him taking the occasional drag off the cigarette. Here is where I'm having a problem. I thought maybe I could set his blinking view to this cigarette puffing view. So, instead of blinking, he takes a puff. Apparantly, this doesn't work. I suppose that if a character is perpetually idle, then they never blink?

Assuming that is correct, I decided I'd have to animate the taking the puff on my own. So, I set up a randomizer in the scene. If activitated, I blockview that character to the cigarette puffing view. Animate it, and then unblock it. It works pretty well, except one problem. While he is animating, the game goes into pause mode. That means the cursor changes to the hourglass. I don't want this. I want the player to still have functionality as if this smoke puffing is going on in the background. Does anyone have any advice about this in any way or fashion. I can't seem to activate an animate command without the game going into pause mode. (similar to calling wait).

Thanks!
-Rich

[ciborium]

See http://americangirlscouts.org/bbc.com/yabb/index.php?topic=28350.msg360323#msg360323

[rich]

Excellent!!! Thanks. I got it to work using that code structure, although I had to change it around a bit. Programming is crazy, huh?