Still trying to sort out the animation bit. It seemed so easy at first, and now I have very little idea of how it is going to work. Starting with the thought from before, the first thing it should do is consider the distance. I would love to recycle the current code, but the distance will not always be the same. In the final game enemies will have different lengths that they attack at, so if the animations only line up at a certain spot, then that wouldn’t be consistent or work.
What I could do is draw a phantom frame. Originally, as I noted in a previous post, the system can detect collision on animation frames that are not displayed. In other words, if the longest animation frame (probably the hit frame btw) would have collision, then line up the animations. I could probably also modify this system for enemy attacks – so they only attack at the tip of their attacks. I’ll do some tests and see what I can see.
After that, the best way would be to sort out how many attack frames are left before the hit frame – and then speed up the animations for Zero to compensate. That way we’ll have fast – and slightly uneven yet more realistic – defense animations. I think that will work out too, but first, the control for testing.
Right now, I’ll put in the bit where when you select a defensive maneuver, the system will lock you into it for the remainder of the attack. Let’s try that first.
-Cool beans. The combat control will now lock you into a method once you enter it. So once you decide to hop, you’ve hopped for the rest of the attack. Which is nice and exactly what it is supposed to do. It also, oddly, makes the combat easier. The defensive maneuver is turned off when the attack finishes, so no more falling/standing into a halfway finished attack and getting punished for it.
-So now I need to test out the animations, but there aren’t any. Next is to tie the defense animation to the system, but there are only 1 frame placeholders, and those work great. So now I need something a little more robust. While I’m in there, I’ll get a proper jump animation too.
– All I got was the starting block frames done. Turns out that Zero doesn’t have a frame that I could use as is, so I had to create 2 of them for the high and low guard. Grr….