How do I animate THEN perform action?

Daftbomb

Hey there,

I have made an actor that spawns an enemy actor every 3 seconds. I have also drawn a few sprites to animate a trapdoor of sorts that opens and shuts. How do I get the spawn actor to animate and then spawn the enemy? I've tried a timer set to "every 3 seconds" and following that a spawn actor action, but it doesn't show the animation, or if it does, it does it very fast. I have tried using a local boolean variable to switch between animating and spawning, I think its the timers...

I'm brand new to this (3rd day playing about with GS) so apologies for the noob problem. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated

KillerPenguinStudios

Hey @Daftbomb,

It's possible that you don't have enough frames for your animations to run well. Also, are you trying to animate open, then spawn, then animate close???

Daftbomb

Thanks for the reply. If I run the animation constantly outside a timer it works perfectly, I only use 4 different images at about 15fps but it's smooth enough for the style I'm using. The moment I move it inside a timer it doesn't work. Because of the speed of the spawn animation I'm not too fussed about a midway spawn but that'd be the icing on the cake.

I've settled for having them animate constantly, but I'd dearly love to understand what is causing this/a solution.

Socks

@Daftbomb said:
How do I get the spawn actor to animate and then spawn the enemy? . . .

I would do it like this . . . let's imagine our animation sequence is this . . . .

Xframe001

Xframe002

Xframe003

Xframe004

Xframe005

Xframe006

Xframe007

Xframe008

Xframe009

. . . you would run the animation as normal (with the animation behaviour) and then place the spawn behaviour in a rule that reads:

When self.image is Xframe009 . . . then do the spawn.

Daftbomb

That's brilliant, makes so much sense. Thank you, I shall give that a go.

UtopianGames

@Daftbomb We have a free template so you can see what Socks said in action, it also does some other cool things like cycle through the animation a set number of times before doing X.

http://www.deepblueapps.com/animation-controller/

Daftbomb

Thank you all for your replies. That video really helped me nail it down.

Having an animation within a timer still isn't working for me, so I've created a boolean "start spawing" set to false. Then within a timer I set it to true. The animation only runs when true, and using your suggestions of using the name of an image in rules I can set it back to false whilst spawning an enemy.

Perfect solution, many thanks

Now, if only I could figure out why the first enemy I spawn won't die I'll be laughing (all others do)