Close combat interaction ['Solved']

[hedgefield]

I'm not really sure where to post this, so this seems like the most risk-free board for it.

Anyway, I'm working on my game again, and I need some help with an advanced interaction. Here's the deal:

The player has been captured by mercenaries and locked in an office building. He manages to escape the room and ends up in the hallway where a guard is working on a vending machine. The player wants to interrogate then take him out. Kinda like MGS/Splinter Cell.
I plan to use this interaction only once.
So when I use the interact cursor on the guard, I want the player character to walk up and grab him from behind. Then, I want to have a conversation with him. After that he has to knock him out.

What would be the best approach to do this? I was thinking I create an animation of him grabbing the guard, and hide/remove the player character and the guard when it plays. Then, after the animation is done playing, I place a seperate character of the player  holding the guard for the conversation, and again an animation to knock the guard out. Then I unhide the player char and place the knocked-out guard as new character. I'll have to do an insane amount of syncing, but it just might work...

[Ishmael]

I'd just do it by animating both characters as themselves, and I'd take care of the synchronising using the repeadetly_execute function and the character[CHARD].frame and .loop variables.

I want the player character to walk up and grab him from behind.

EEeer.... o_O

Sorry, couldn't resist it

[hedgefield]

Yeah i was thinking about that aswell. It'd require an insane amount of syncing, but it's possible. Also, I'd have to place some parts of the player character on the guard sprite, because I can't  have one arm go behind the sprite and one in front of it.

There goes my spare time... :

[Ishmael]

I'd have to place some parts of the player character on the guard sprite, because I can't have one arm go behind the sprite and one in front of it.

Who says you can't have a hole in the player sprites?

[hedgefield]

Not me. I thought of that first, but having the guard fit into the hole in the player sprite is a harder job than cutting the players arms off and including them in the guard sprite. Sync-wise.

[EDIT]
The more and more I think about this, the harder it's getting. It all seemed so beautiful in my mind, but executing it is turning out to be more trouble than it's worth...

BUT, not to fear. I've devised an easy and about-as-good replacement. I'm gonna make the whole animation thing a 3-frame comic cutscene. No tiresome animation hassle, just a quick cutscene that shows the player grabbing the guard. Then it'll go back to the game, and there will be the characters in grabbed pose for the conversation. Then another cutscene where the player knocks the guard out. It'll be a LOT less frustration for me, and I'll stay true to the comic it was inspired on. Fantastic.

[Ishmael]

That does save time.

About the synchronising, I think the AGS co-ordinate system is stable enough that if you move the characters to the correct locations and just run the animations the advanced way (by which I here mean that using the rep_ex to check where the animation is going, instead of using a row of blocking AnimateCharacterEx commands).

[hedgefield]

Yeah, the syncing might not have been the big problem, but I'm not very good at animating so, for me, it would have been a frustrating journey. Finding creative workarounds seems to be more rule than exception in my case. :

Thanks for pointing out those commands though, they'll come in handy in general development.