Done. Look at all that orange over there =>. Great development day yesterday, the brain was working in some kind of hyper mode fueled by something magical perhaps. The blocks all work and the throws work now too. It turns out that the problem I was having with the throw animations was the bloody hotkey. You see, the throw references the kind of attack it is to decide how many frames to play and whatnot. Without an attack, it pulls down a zero, and then proceeds to work correctly, play for exactly zero frames and reset. So, now it works and the counter system almost works.
When I went to bed around midnight I was trying to figure it out. I can create a throw situation, which is what the counter AI requires, but without an attack to reference then it will just fail, like the hotkey approach. So, I commented up the throw function so it’ll do something a little different on a counter. If the enemy’s state is one of the blocks, the code will reference a specific attack instead of the one fed into it. It sounds a little convoluted, but basically, instead of feeding the function a healthy breakfast of variable numbers, I going to serve up a big bowl of constants and juice. It should work, and we’ll find out.
Next up should be the AI balancing and making it work with different enemy types, but I’m willing to wait on that until after I have animations. The basic actions are all there, how they interact together (like in the Doc) or doing more specific things in certain places is something I can do later. What is needed sooner rather than later is the Wall Hop ability. Since its inclusion will make a specific change in the way the levels are going to work.
Either way, I need to finish the programming stuff quickly so I can get back into level construction. The clock, as always, is ticking.
– In something totally random I’ve been writing about code not working and violence and the Google Gods have gifted me with an advert about Windows Mobile, proving that they at least have a sense of irony.