event timeline

tetsuo

Hey all, I've currently got an "attack" animation running and at some point during the animation I want to be able to check collisions. With another skeletal toolkit I've used, you could use the key frame of a bone to determine when to do actions e.g. on key frame x check for collisions. (this worked well because if you changed the timing of animation everything would still work). As far as I understand it, the "event timeline" feature will let us be able to specify events during the animation. I guess I'm wondering what the standard way of handling this is without that feature. Should I be using times? e.g. I start the animation, then after x milliseconds, I check for collisions?

Any help appreciated.

Søren

That's one way you can do it. Another way would be to create a bone with a specific name and then place a keyframe on it at the time you wish to check for collisions. Then check for keyframes on that specific bone at runtime. Doing it this way will allow you to change the timing. It's not a perfect way of doing it of course, the event timeline will certainly make it easier 🙂

tetsuo

I'm not sure how to implement the "Then check for keyframes on that specific bone at runtime." part. Can you point me in the right direction?

Thanks.

Nate

An animation has a number of timelines. You can access these programmatically. Find a timeline in your special animation for your special bone, then look at the times for each key. This would allow you to define the keys in Spine and access them at runtime to do something. This is not quite as nice as the event timeline feature though.