Custom Talk Animations in LassieAS
Hi, everybody! I'm in the process of redoing the Nearly Departed demo in LassieAS and there are some minor things I'm having trouble getting working. One thing I can kind of work around (I think people have experienced it: when a character is facing left, for example, but when they talk they flop to face right) but if anyone has a real solution, let me know. The other has to do with custom talk animations. If you've played the ND Demo, you can see an example of this by talking to the moon on the first screen. It plays a "howling" animation. Now, in LASSIE Director, when adding the dialog text for that there's a little window that accepts an integer, and it would reference a Flash frame in the _char SWF file that starts with "talk" (so in this case, the howl animation was a frame labeled "talk9" and so the integer in that little window was 9.) That worked fine in Director, but in LassieAS I can't get it to play custom talk frames. It just plays the default talk animation. Anyone know how to get custom talk frames to play correctly in AS? Thanks!

Before you yank out too much hair over this problem, first let me confirm that I actually wired up that talk integer within the LassieAS engine. That's a small and obscure enough feature that I may have hard-coded a value while programming it and never went back in to link it to the proper data item. I'll look into this and follow up in a bit!

Holy mother of "run for cover", John! Geeze... you're killing me here making me dive into these old systems! :wink: However, the verdict: I had never actually programmed in any support for custom dialogue expressions. Hence the reason that they didn't work. So, I had to dive into the character animation control logic for this update which I remembered absolutely nothing about other than it was a nightmare to write. And holy cow... fellas, our beloved Lassie is being powered by one *spectacular* Flash hack (if I don't say so myself :D). Works like a charm though, so the update was fairly easy! Anyway, there are revised player SWFs posted in the Lassie forum topic.

Awesome. Seems to work so far!