Straightforward way to jump to a frame in a movieclip?

Biggerplay

I have a game movieclip, which displays a set of 5 frames, however there is a 6th frame which is a different frame (a death frame).

I don't see however a straightward way to just show that 6th frame when I want? I thought I could set up the MC with all 6 frames, and then set the number of frames it's looping through to 5, and then when I want to show the death frame, I just do mc.currentFrame = 5, but I can't do that because I can't set the number of frames to 5 as it's a read only property, is there a straightforward way of doing this?

epa_neto

Are you using spritesheet? If yes, why don't you use labels for that? Like 5 frames will be the idle animation and the death frame would be a differente label.

Biggerplay

@epa_neto, I'm using a sprite sheet, and adding the frames as the guide shows, but then how I would I just to a frame with a label?

epa_neto

If you are generating the spritesheet through flash for example ( and using texture packer http://www.codeandweb.com/texturepacker), it will read the labels at flash timeline and create labels on the spritesheet. Just like you do to make animations separated in "walk", "idle", "hurt".

On flash

http://s8.postimg.org/dy3lbsjbp/Screen_Shot_2014_02_05_at_4_27_21_PM.png

On spritesheet xml
<SubTexture name="walk_000" x="0" y="0" width="50" height="50" />
...
<SubTexture name="cry_000" x="50" y="0" width="50" height="50" />

Biggerplay

I know but how do I set the movieclip to show just that frame?

epa_neto

I guess you would have to recreate the movieclip, because when you get the texture of a "label", sparrow only retrieve the necessary frames.

Example

///get textures
textures = [atlas texturesStartingWith:@"walk_"];

// create movie clip
movie = [[SPMovieClip alloc] initWithFrames:textures fps:10];

....

///get new textures
textures = [atlas texturesStartingWith:@"run_"];

////kill previous movieclip
[movie dispose]

////recreate the movieclip
movie = [[SPMovieClip alloc] initWithFrames:textures fps:10];

Hope that helps.

Biggerplay

Hmm,thanks for the help, I was hoping I could just do something like mc.currentFrame = 5 or "death", or mc.gotoAndStop("") like in Flash, that would be a very useful addition to Sparrow.

TTStu

Hi BiggerPlay,

it's helpful to think of your animations (movieclips) as just that: animations.

Your character is made up of animations (movement) and stills (images) to represent various states.

So you'd have a parent SPSprite character with a "walking" animation (for example) stored as an SPMovieClip and it sounds like you have a single image for when the character is dead, so that'd be an SPImage.

When the character is in motion, the SPMovieClip would be visible = YES, and the SPImage would be visible=NO.

When it dies, call [movieclip stop] and set movieclip.visible = NO, and set deathimage.visible = YES.

Think also if your character could fly, and swim and jump. You would have separate SPMovieClip animations for each of those, and couldnt' possibly do it by manipulating a single SPMovieClip, so it makes sense to store each state as a separate member variable (SPMovieClips, SPImages etc) and just tweak what is visible at any one time.

TTStu

Ps, even though I feel what I wrote above is the "correct" way to deal with multi-state sprites, if you really wanted to hack it to work like you wanted, then you could consider setting the duration of frame 6 to 0.0f and then when it dies set the duration of frame 6 to any positive number you want and set the duration of ALL the other frames to 0.0f, and then setting currentFrame to 5.

Either that or subclass SPMovieClip to only count/iterate up to a certain specified frame count.