A new question about character selection (Solved)

There have been a lot of questions about character selection screens, but nothing that I can find about actually implementing multiple character choices in a game...

Here is a copy of the capx I am working with, and you can see that in the "Menu" group, the player selects a character, but each character has 4 or 5 different animations, and aside from creating each of the four characters as their own sprite with four copies of all of the events

For example:

-mob collides with playerbox

+player set animation to "ouch"

would have to tell all four character sprites to animate "ouch", wouldn't it?

How can I actually go about implementing multiple characters?

Thanks so much :)

Probably the best way to do it is this:

You should already have an object "player" which is an invisible rectangle, and the "player_image" animations are stuck on top of that. If you don't have this, do it now, as it will save you a collision headache in the future.

Once you have done this, simply add and rename all of the animations in the player_image so you have something like this:

1_run

1_attack

1_walk

1_jump

Then you can just add the corresponding other character's animations in the same format.

2_run

2_attack

2_walk

2_jump

3_run

3_attack

3_walk

3_jump

etc.

Then, you should have a global variable called 'character' or something which will always be the number your character is at the moment.

Then, in your animations, instead of doing

set animation to: "run"

you can just

set animation to: character & "_run"

And that should work nicely.

And what if the characters have different animations, so the hitboxes would be different?

You can always resize the invisible rectangle. Seriously, however, it is extremely important to have the invisible rectangle, unless you fancy yourself getting stuck in walls...

Probably the best way to do it is this:

Oh my gosh, I was so close. Hahaha. If you look at the capx, I'm already doing the exact same thing in the menu events, it just never clicked that I could do that for animations. :) Thanks sqiddster. Also, as per the platform tutorial I am already using invisible player rectangles.

Once again, I love you C2 forums. :)

Edit: They should put this post in the sticky. I searched for ages, and it's such a simple/powerful demonstration of using variables in expressions. May be useful to other people jsut starting out in programming.

I am running into some trouble with the method described. I think it's a pretty simple syntax mistake on my part, but I have two players, and each one is a different instance of the "player" sprite, with their respective "player_images" instance pinned on top. The problem I have is picking the proper player_images when an instance of "player" is picked. I gave them both an instance variable, "player" which is either 1 or 2, but when player 1 runs into a mob, both player_images still flash.

Is there a simple way to give a particular instance of an object a preference for the player_images with the player instance variable which is the same as its own?

Here's the capx.

dl.dropbox.com/u/11790413/Final_Project.capx

Edit: Wait, I think I figured it out. lmao

This is what i did in pseudocode

• is condition

+ is action

-Player on collision with mob

-Player_Images.player = Player.player

    +actions go here

Seems to work ok. :)

Glad I helped :D