Monster Animations HELP!

[ShaggyDowns]

Greetings everyone,

I am new to RTC and very new to the forums. I have spent the last few days messing around with RTC and I wished I would of came across it years ago! I have a question about creating new animation for a monster's attack.

First off, I took the kobold images from EOB1 and put them into RTC. The kobolds have a 2 step process/animation for attacking. I figured out how to get the images in and create an attack animation using 2 seperate images. Problem is I can't keep the kobolds attack animation to stay in sync. I thought that the animation would run only when the kobold attacks, but it seems like it is constantly running even when they are not attacking.

Whenever the kobold attacks, the animation runs at whatever point it's currently on, instead of running the animation from the start. So, sometimes the kobolds attack in sync, but after a couple times, the animation starts falling out of sync. Other times when they attack it will start on the 2nd frame, instead of the first frame. Anyone have an idea how to fix this? It would be really cool to have a couple images for a monster's attack, instead of just using 1 images all the time.

Thanks in advance!

~SD~

[Gambit37]

Unfortunately this is a current limitation of RTCs animation format. The animations are tied to the game clock which ticks six times every second and animation states are not remembered, so each time it plays it just carries on from where it left off. This is one reason why I decided not to bother with animation frames for monsters in my own project as it's simply not possible to get reliable results.

If you ask nicely in the suggestions forum, George (RTC programmer) might be able to improve this.

Welcome to the forums byt the way. I hope you enjoy your stay. Why not pop by this thread to tell us a bit more about yourself?

[ShaggyDowns]

Okies...

Thanks for the quick response and the welcome by the way. That's to bad about the animations, since I really wanted to use em. Although, it will save me a lot of extra time creating them anyways!

Do you know if George will be creating another version/update for RTC?

~SD~

[Trantor]

Welcome to the forums!
And it's very likely George will create another update, as he has already fixed a bug for the next version.

[Gambit37]

I should note that you CAN do some consistently repeatable animations by doing clever SWAP mechanics -- in theory. I've not tried it myself but the idea I just had would be something like this:

1) Create a custom monster (#1) with standard four frames (front, back, side, attack)
2) Create another version of this monster (#2) who's attack frame is the next frame in your animation
3) Create a new attack method that fires a custom action (you'd clone the action from the default one)
4) The custom action needs to SWAP monster #1 with #2.
5) If you want to get fancy, you can create as many versions of the monster as frames of your animation and use chaining through relays to stagger all the actions into sequence.
6) Assign the action to the new attack method from (3)
7) Assign the attack method to monster #1
Do the same for each step
EDIT: 9) Actually there's a bunch of other steps you need to do as well relating to how you chain all these events. It's too complicated. But I might experiment with it one day.

Now, I'm now sure if all the monsters original attributes are retained or if they are replaced with the attributes coming from monster #2. If the latter, then this won't work.

Oh, and I just realised another problem. If the attack method you cloned is a normal monster attack, then the method above will mean the monster attacks on every frame which you don't want. So in fact, you'd need a few 'dummy' actions that do nothing for the first few frames and then the last frame does the attack method.

Actually, I have no idea if this would work, I'm just thinking out loud. You should probably ignore me.

Uh. Right. *whistles*

[ShaggyDowns]

Ha,

Sounds to complicated for me! I guess I will just stick to the single images for now and pray that George will take the animation issue into consideration for a future RTC release.

I will most likely have more questions as they come up. I was gonna ask about making animations for monster deaths, but guessing that wouldn't work either...

Thanks again for the help and the welcomes!!!

~SD~