Following Objects Tutorial, Now with TGF Version

I honestly don't know if one of these exists on the site or not, seeing as it's down, but I made it on request, so here it is. In the spiret of my previous how-tos, it's well commented and looks at the concept from a couple different directions.

Oh yeah, MMF-only folks. There are now both MMF and TGF flavors. The only difference is the TGF version lacks the Shadow Target trial method, but I don't think anyone will miss it.

UPDATE: Added one more trail method.
UPDATE: Direction
UPDATE: Stop flag
UPDATE: Initialization
UPDATE: New trail method, direction fix
UPDATE: TGF Version available

Attached File ( Number of downloads: 32 )
 followtut.zip

Very nice engine, RII. Sometimes it's a bit choppy though.

It's choppy when using a shadow target. Nature of the beast, it's the best workaround I could find to make an object stop short. Maybe I'm missing some better concept, but I really did hammer away at it for a good hour without success.

Added one more trail method that stops the trailing object whenever the main object stops moving. This allows for smooth movement and for the object to stop short, but the trailing object will not be able to approach the main object like it can in the other two methods.

*I did this before you did your extra trailing method, i'll check that out after this post*

Okay, I checked it out and it's basically what I want. Something with the shadow target one, is sometimes the follower will cut over backdrop objects, but I found a neat way to remedy the non-shadow object follower from going directly into the target, and that was to simply add

Where it says always add 1 to alterable value A I put

speed of Main Target > 0
Always

And where it says always set position of the trailing object to that array thing, I also put

Always
speed of Main Target > 0

And it seems to do exactly what I want now, even looks a little more natural. Try it.

That's actually what I did with the third method

Your edit was essentially the same thing as what I did. This is awesome. Do directions work? Like, does the following object face the direction it's "walking"?

No, but it wouldn't be hard to add

Perhaps you could add it? *hides*

Seriously, I tried adding it and I can't exactly get it to work, at least not in a useable way, they sidestep most of the time.

Added. I used a second Advanced Direction Object that had 32 directions instead of 360.

Yay! Now all I have to do is find a decent way to implement this into my game.

Edit: Oh, another thing, what about animation such as walking and stopped?

This post has been edited by KritTheRed on Jan 31 2005, 10:14 PM

See edit

Oh and sorry about all the requests and things for this, just want to get it perfect, and questions and such like this can be good for making a perfect tutorial.

Feedback is always a good thing. I can't recall ever getting anything perfect on the first pass.

If you're using Movement Stop, your trailing object will stop animating when your main object stops. That should be simple to implement.
If you're using Shadow Target, Flag 1 on the main object is set ON when the trailing object stops.
If you're not using either, then the trailing object stops when its X and Y coordinates match the X and Y coordinates of the main object.

Could someone please 'translate' this to TGF if possible? =X

I'm using movement stop, but if I stop the animation for the trailing object when the main object stops, it slides for a little way in stopped animation before actually coming to a halt, same goes for starting animations, it will begin to walk a little bit before it actually starts to walk if I start the animation based on when the main object starts.

I'll just change it a bit so a universal flag is set for all of them

Holy crap that rules. Awesome job, RII.

See if that helps for stopped states. Flag 1 of the trailing object will be set ON when it's stopped. I set the colors to invert in the demo to designate stopped state.

I really wanna see it ;;

I did distribute a compiled EXE...