I honestly think that Photoshop and Flash MX are all you need to create the art assets you would want. I also use Toonboom for doing my animations, but everything you would do in there can be done with Flash MX. And I wouldn't dismiss Spriter. I think that will probably be more friendly towards artists than you might think.

Good luck with your project.

I'm really liking the darker, moodier direction that you're taking the art in. The lighting on the wall works really well and the whole thing has a nice texture to it. Keep up the good work. Its looking great.

Animmaniac That works great. I'll have to study up on UID's as I'm still pretty new and that is a bit out of my wheelhouse.

The reason that sticking to those image points are so important is because I'm going to have situations where the animation and movement is going to change whether you are holding an object or a person.

If you're lifting an object, the animation will have them bending over, picking it up, and carrying it above their head. I need to be able to have the object follow an image point on the animation so it lines up.

More importantly, when you are carrying a civilian I am going to have a stock set of animation for the torso, legs, and cape. Then I'm going to use the image point to overlay the player's head, arms, and whichever person they are holding.

<img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56104169/Carrying%2011-23-12.jpg" border="0" />

Animmaniac That is really cool. I like how the Civilian box kind of shifts to the position. I really need to look into "lerp". It looks like it can be used for easing things into place which would give a more organic look to some of the things that I'm doing.

However, with the way I'm working, I need the lifted object to constantly be stuck to an exact spot on the animation. For instance, If I animate someone bending down and picking up a box, I need the box to stick to the character's hand the in each frame of animation.

That's why I went with creating an invisible sprite that updates to the image point through the entire game and then pinning to that sprite using chrisbrobs method.

Here's the capx: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56104169/PinTest%2011-21-12.capx

Figured it out! At least I think I did. So I went and followed the steps that chrisbrobs used to pin the object to the player at the image point. Problem is, it wouldn't follow the image point as it updated through the animations.

So to fix that, I created a sprite (that will be invisible during play) that would update its position every tick to be at that specific image point that I wanted. Then, instead of pinning the object to the player, I pin it to the sprite that is updating to be on the image point. I still have to do more testing, but so far its working great.

Thanks for everyone's help!

Thanks, — I tried teaching myself C# for a long time and couldn't wrap my artist brain around it. Construct 2 is the sole reason I didn't have to give up on my game idea. But I'm still jealous of programmers. I regularly hit road blocks that a mind for programming could fix. The community here has been great for helping me get past those.

> aruche that is AWESOME and exactly what I needed. Problem is that I'm trying to set the object down and any code I try to figure out isn't working. I'm trying to toggle the carrying off and have it end up at the player's image point and left there on the stage.

If you're doing what I think you're doing, you have similar setups for the events for turning carrying on and off. Problem with this is that they will toggle in order.

This order of events:

+ Player presses S

+ Carrying = false

- Toggle Carrying

+ Player presses S

+ Carrying = true

- Toggle Carrying

It's first going to toggle the Carrying variable, but instantly afterwards it's going to toggle it again, because the conditions for that event have now become true. This will give the appearance that it doesn't work and you can't pick up the item, while in reality you're picking it up and immediately putting it down. If you reverse the order you'll have the opposite problem, you can pick the item up, but you can't put it down.

> I really appreciate the help. Also, if you could friefly explain what you did, that would help me learn it for next time. Thanks!He's effectively doing what I wrote in my post.

So are you saying that there's no way of setting the object back down? Maybe I should look into destroying the object and spawning a duplicate where I want it set down. It might even be easier to attach a sprite object containing all of the objects you would carry to the player. That way I could just give the illusion of holding it. Thoughts?

aruche that is AWESOME and exactly what I needed. Problem is that I'm trying to set the object down and any code I try to figure out isn't working. I'm trying to toggle the carrying off and have it end up at the player's image point and left there on the stage.

I really appreciate the help. Also, if you could friefly explain what you did, that would help me learn it for next time. Thanks!

I'm afraid I'm really lost. I have conditions set up for the player being over the object (orange box), a variable to check if the player is already holding an object, and what I think is a boolean checking if the box is being held. Then the player should just press the S key to pick it up.

Problem is there is no option to check anything every tick to adjust the position. I can just assign the position, but without the "every tick" function, it just pops to where the image point was on the first frame and stays there.

I've attached my capx file and would appreciate and help on figuring this out. I'm kind of lost. Thanks.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56104169/PinTest.capx

You just need to set the object's position to the image point before you pin it.

That's working for lining up the object first, but I need it to follow the image point in other animations. Its basically lining itself up with the image point in the default pose and then pinning it there. When I switch animations, it still stays in the position from the image point on the default frame.

I don't think there's an option for that under Pin. Once you pin to object, it really only lets you select the mode (position, angle, rope, etc). If there's no easy way, I may create a blank sprite at the image point and then pin the objects to that.

I'm trying to have my character be able to lift and carry objects around (and eventually set them down). I had it working where when the player overlapped the object and pressed a button, the object would be pinned to the player. I'd like to use an image point to control the location of the object in the animation. For example, place the player's image point on his hand and have the object stick to it.

I see a set position/angle feature that allows you to choose the Image Point, but can't find anything similar in the Pin Behavior. Any help is appreciated.