In my prototype I’m making, I’m testing out a finite state machine that works with a transformation system. In my game, you can collect items to temporarily transform yourself with new abilities.
So far so good. So when my character collects a cake, I want them to transform, changing into a state that acts as the “transition” to the transformed state (Plays an animation).
However, when I touch the cake, nothing happens. I even have debug text showing that displays the state, and it’s not changing to “getsugar.” My current states are overriding this state…
I tried using Trigger Onces and a scene variable to block them, but they introduce their own issues. I COULD just use a “Variable is NOT getsugar” for each state, but it’s a bad practice, and with a lot of transformations, that can get messy…
I did that with an old project back when I was still new to this engine, and it got messy and out of control fast:
The problem is the way you’ve implemented the FSM. As it stands, you’re waiting for an animation to finish, but only if the state is “getsugar”. The state will be changing while the animation is playing, so the final getsugar event will never get actioned.
The idea of an FSM is that you code all the possible actions for each state. You have a parent event that checks what the state is, and then have all that state’s events as subevents. It might mean some actions are repeated in multiple states (so checking for idle will be an separate event for each state that needs it), but it also isolates the actions for each state to only e run while in that state.
That first event is checked no matter what the state is, and so will get checked for every state.
Ideally you’d have
State is Idle
idle event1
idle event2
idle event3 etc
State is jumping
jump event1
jump event2
jump event3 etc
and so on.
You won’t need to check if the player is idle when the state is idle. Nor will you need to check that the player is idle or jumping while the state is getsugar and the animation hasn’t finished.
Refactor the events so each state has it’s own set of events, and you should find it works.
I’m checking out the Not-A-Vania example for pointers. While it DOES work, and works well, it looks like an awful lot of code to copy paste. Despite that, I appreciate how much control you have over it this way.
Is this truly the most ideal way to make the state machine?
I tried to make it so that if the player is not moving, change to idle, and now I’m currently using if none of the movement keys are down
Neither works. The player just scoots one pixel across the floor when I press the move key and the state stays in idle
I have no idea why this doesn’t work, considering Not-A-Vania does this same sort of thing and it works just fine
The online FSM documentation says to use an inverted “Any key pressed,” which DOES work, but that could cause bugs, as if I’m holding another key down, the state stays in move, which could cause problems down the line. Basically, I’d like to narrow down which keys have to be not pressed
