TGB - 4 Direction Movement

#1 I would suggest you look at controlling the movement with behaviors. I found much use of the behaviors provided on the TGB behavior page at: http://tdn.garagegames.com/wiki/TGB/Behaviors

There are some movement behaviors there with great control.

#2 I checked out some of the behavior tutorials but didn't really find what I was looking for. Perhaps I overlooked it, but I continued on with scripting movement and got it to work in only 4 directions. The problem is that the animations are messed up. I'm going to keep looking into it and tweaking the code, but if there's something I'm overlooking in behaviors, please let me know.

#3 Are your animations coded into your keyboard bindings, or to the character's movements? Creating a simple check loop might help clear up the issue if you are coding the changes into the keybindings.

#4 Yes, the animations are coded into the keyboard bindings. The way I have it written out seems to me to be the "long" way of doing it, as there is a long list of code and it's still not complete due to animation problems. I can show you what I've done for the character if that would help, but here's a little snippet of the code:

function PlayerUp()
{
$MainCharacter.moveUp = true;
$MainCharacter.updateMovement();
}

//then skip the other directions...

function PlayerUpStop()
{
$MainCharacter.moveUp = false;
$MainCharacter.updateMovement();
$MainCharacter.playAnimation( mc_back_still_Animation);
}

//again, skipping the other directions to save space

function MainCharacter::updateMovement(%this)
{
if(%this.moveLeft)
{
$MainCharacter.setLinearVelocityX( -$MainCharacter.hSpeed );
$MainCharacter.playAnimation( mc_left_Animation );
}


So I showed one of each direction of code. Meaning, I showed code for moving and stopping code while facing upward, but I have code for down, left, and right, which looks the same. Also, to have only 4 directions, I put this in:


function MainCharacter::updateMovement(%this)
{
// this is where I had the if(%this.moveLeft) and set the velocity
// as well as the animations for the various movements.

if(!%this.moveLeft && !%this.moveRight)
{
%this.setLinearVelocityX( 0 );
}


if(!%this.moveUp && !%this.moveDown)
{
%this.setLinearVelocityY( 0 );
}

}

So that's basically what I've been using, but it feels (and probably looks) really cluttered, as though I'm making it harder than it needs to be. Like I stated earlier, if you need the entire file of code, I'd be happy to put it up here, just let me know.

#5 What I would recommend is that when a key is pressed, you immediately clear all of the other movement flags:

function PlayerUp()
{
$MainCharacter.moveUp = true;

$MainCharacter.moveDown = false;
$MainCharacter.moveLeft = false;
$MainCharacter.moveRight = false;

$MainCharacter.updateMovement();
}

...so that whatever keys were currently pressed will now be ignored.

#6 Thank you very much! That is exactly what I was looking for!