Changing the "Animation Graphic" of an animation?

[BwdYeti]

Okay, I'm using Cogwheel's RTAB and Minkoff's Animated Battlers. Instead of doing attacks/spells like Animated Battlers does by default I'm creating animations and then playing them on top of the user (while hiding the user) for a more unique feel. However, I was recently trying to plan out how to number my animations for consistency/simplicity, and... Well, I have 30 base enemies, with 6 versions each, and 39 unique enemies/bosses. With their basic attacks and spells that's over 1000 animations, not counting customized gethit animations. So the easiest way to get around that, I think, would be to use the same animations for each version of the base enemies, since they all do the same thing, and then just change the Animation Graphic to be the correct one. (Changing something like hue isn't good enough, and I have a reason I need this number of enemies) So... Is there a way I could go about this, or some other way if this isn't possible/feasible?

Spoiler: resolved

Also a sidenote, some of the enemies and bosses join the player and it would be easier to play their animations flipped than to create copies of them. Is that possible?

-EDIT-
This problem is resolved, but there's another one further down

 

[boon]

I think Minkoff's Animated Battlers Flips the animation so that is corresponds to the correct player. Like if I make a gunshot animation, for the enemies it will head towards the player and vice vera.

 

[BwdYeti]

Ah, there already is a fix to do that part, you're right. Thanks.
Still need the other part though. :/

 

[BwdYeti]

Bump.

 

[Devon Jacobs]

Well can't you just change Opacity of the battler to 0(invisible) and then just use animations or play graphgic for the casting? I am not sure what you mean by it so I am shooting in the dark.

 

[BwdYeti]

That's what I'm already doing for their attacks. The problem is I'm going to end up with more animations than the database allows, so I want to use multiple Animation Graphics for some animations since they're basically the same animation just with different characters.

Not knowing much about how the battle system is scripted or how sprites work, I assume I'd have to change the bitmap for the animation, right? Wherever it sets the animation number I need it to check the enemy's id, or a variable for the party that I can set wherever, then change the bitmap based on the current bitmap. (If it's possible to modify the name of the bitmap as a string, changing something like Guy1 to Guy 2 or Guy3 or whatever, but if not I guess I'd need a lengthy case statement)

 

[Devon Jacobs]

Why don't you make one sprite sheet with the same animations of different people, and then call them with up, left, down, right? Then you can have 4 different animations withou needing multiple differnt sprite sheets.

 

[BwdYeti]

Isn't direction only used by Characters (on the map)? That doesn't help much, I'm talking about in battle. Although that's another possible idea if changing the image is too hard, but it would require rewriting how the default animation system works so it can be more than 5 cells wide and know which section of 5 cells of width to use.

Unless I missed your meaning.

-EDIT-
I think I might have actually found a way to do it (I found where the RTAB sets an animation's bitmap) but I never got the flipped animations working. The edit that set it up was made for the default battle system. D:

http://hometown.aol.com/Der%20VVulfman/ ... s_Side.zip This

If anyone knows what I'd have to do to get that working with Cogwheel's RTAB I'd be very grateful.

 

[BwdYeti]

Well, I got both things working myself. If anyone wants to know how I could either show where things need to be changed, or make a demo of it, I dunno.

Anyway, I have a new problem, one that might be easier to fix... Whenever anyone attacks/casts a spell/uses an item and the animation is playing I want all activity to stop. By default it acts somewhat like this, stopping AT gauges during animations, but I want no new actions to start until the current animation ends (for example, normally the player could mash Enter when multiple characters are ready and they all attack at the same time, and sometimes enemies do the same thing when their AT gauges sync up). This could be fixed possibly by queuing actions up so they go one after another, and no AT gauges start to refill until all actions are done. However I don't want... say, individual parts of an action delayed, like the hit animation, or common events called by a skill.

 

[BwdYeti]

Bump.

I'm thinking the easiest way would be to... set a boolean flag when someone does something, and somehow turn it off whenever no one is active. Then... when it's on, if any enemy's AT gauge fills up it would subtract a small number from it so they won't do anything automatically, and disallow the player selecting targets (they can bring up the arrow but it would make an error sound if they try to select someone)

Oh, didn't mention this before, I commented out the elsif that caused AT gauges to freeze when the player's command window is up (line 2179ish), but the problem I'm having can happen either way.

I feel kinda silly having an idea how to fix this but not knowing where to go in the script to make those things happen how I want. >_>

 

[BwdYeti]

Bump.

 

[themysticalone]

I don't have an answer, but In the next week or so, I plan to try to figure out how to get only one action occurring simultaneously with RTAB too.  I merged RTAB with ccoa's side view system awhile back and it does some interesting things with the movetos if things are allowed to be extremely simultaneous.