animations changing size

Stryfe01

Hey guys. Took the day off to work on level design and i'm having an issue. Sometimes when I play an animation, it changes the size of the characters. Is there a way to stop that from happening? For instance, I have a neck snap animation for the enemy death. I have it executing properly (great sound), but it shrinks the player and enemy animation. I think it may be that the sprites are smaller, than what I adjusted them to in the scene, but what do you guys think?

firemaplegames

If your animations or graphics for the character are larger than the character's 'standing still' collision area, you generally want to split them up...

For instance if the character has a huge sword, or a flowing cape, or does some sort of huge back flip, etc..

I would do it like this:

Have two Actors, one is just an invisible box. This is what the player actually controls. This is the character's collision area.

The graphics and animations are a separate Actor that is constrained to the invisible box.

That way the size of the animations is independent of the size of the collision area.

gyroscope

firemaplegames said:

Have two Actors, one is just an invisible box. This is what the player actually controls. This is the character's collision area.

The graphics and animations are a separate Actor that is constrained to the invisible box.

That way the size of the animations is independent of the size of the collision area.

That's neat, Joe, I like that!

Also, Stryfe01, your prob concerning certain frames shrinking in your animation, might be solved by the following:

Make sure the actual size is the same for all your frames, i.e as the transparent background. This will be dictated by the largest width of one of your animation frames, and the largest height, which could well bea different frame. That'll be your transparent background size for you to place in the graphics. Hope that helps.

:-)

Stryfe01

I get what your saying firemaple. But if that is the case, shouldn't the size of the animations be constrained to the size of my current actor as well?

I think I tried that earlier, but i'll give it a shot.

firemaplegames

Like gyroscope says, all the animations should be the same size - using the worst case as the size for the rest of them...