Custom Walking Animations?

[learningknight]

Ok, this seems like a stupid, easy question but I have searched everywhere and can't seem to find an answer.

My goal:  to exceed the 19-frame limit on walking animations while still having eight different walk directions.

Basically, AGS is set up to automatically deal with with walking animations: in a View, the first loop (loop 0) is walk down, the second is walk left, etc.  Each loop accepts 19 frames of animation, no more.  In order to have a very smooth animation, however, I want to use more like 30 frames for each direction the character can walk (Up, Down, Left, Right, and the four diagonals).  How can I get around this?

I've already checked that box that says, "run the loop after this one to make one long animation" and while it works fine in the preview, when I actually run the game AGS plays only loop 0 over and over again and completely ignores the next loop.  Besides, it seems like checking that box means that Loop 1 (the second loop, usually reserved for Walk Left), is used for Walk Down, which therefore limits the number of directions the guy can walk (8 becomes 4).

Any ideas?  I can't find any script command like "IsCharacterWalkingLeft" or anything like that, which I could use to tell which way the player is walking and therefore let me run the appropriate animation.

[monkey0506]

You could set up the standing frames in the Character's normal view and then set up the walking frames for each direction in a different view. Then you could do this:

Code: ags

bool viewLocked = false;

function repeatedly_execute_always() {
  if ((player.Moving) && (!viewLocked)) { // the player is moving and the view has not been locked yet
    if (player.Loop == 0) player.LockView(VPLAYERDOWN);
    else if (player.Loop == 1) player.LockView(VPLAYERLEFT);
    else if (player.Loop == 2) player.LockView(VPLAYERRIGHT);
    else if (player.Loop == 3) player.LockView(VPLAYERUP);
    player.Animate(0, player.AnimationSpeed, eRepeat, eNoBlock);
    viewLocked = true;
    }
  else if ((!player.Moving) && (viewLocked)) { // the view is locked, but player stopped moving
    player.UnlockView();
    viewLocked = false;
    }
  }

This is untested and may take some work to get the starting/stopping to look exactly right, but hopefully this can start you off in the right direction.

@Ashen's post down there:

Heh. I completely forgot AGS 3.0 removed that limit, but yes, if you're not too far into development, I would highly recommend a port to AGS 3.0 (for several reasons).

Also I've changed 'repeatedly_execute' to 'repeatedly_execute_always' because rep_ex won't run during a blocking animation (such as walking (the 'Walk' function itself is blocking (normally))). AFAIK rep_ex_always will still be run though.

[learningknight]

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense!  I will give that a try...

[Ashen]

Or, if you're not very far into your game, update to 3.0 which has no limit on Frames per Loop.