Broken animated tiles

[nadeauhugo]

I was playing with a map and noticed something odd. First I tought that all my animated tiles were broken, maybe because of FT Improver engine or something. But then I realized that some of my animated tiles were working fine, and more than that, that they seemed to have a "A" flag attached to them.

It must mean an "Animated" flag needed to actually remind the engine to animate those tiles. I checked, but it seems that there is no way to flag a tile this way in the Editor. And I check in Red!Viewer, and all my tiles are already checked "Animated". Checked or not, they don't show the "A" file in the editor, and simply don't animate themselves.

Could somebody have some more information regarding this behaviour and how to solve it?

Flagged A, correctly animated

Not flagged A, broken animation

 

[RobertHouse]

Have you tried any of the editors "Tools" functions? I can't remember all of the options off the top of my head but I believe there is a couple options to rebuild the maps tile data, could possibly fix this.

If you do try to play around with the tools to see if it helps, I'd backup the map(s) as using the tools resets a few things. I'm sure you know this already though.

 

[nadeauhugo]

Finally got it working! All my animated tiles works now. Hang-Lip sent me some clues and I managed to understand how everything was working.

Apparently the A is correctly used to represent the Animated Flag for tiles, and when you add a tile it usually do not add all the correct flags for some reasons, like the Animated flag. Also, when you modify any tile in the directories, it does not update the tiles in the maps automatically, even if you open a mission and save. We need to use the option "Update Tiles Used" for that.

What it does is simply to check all tiles and assign them the related flags, like Animated, Etherial, Climable and Window. I think that "Allow Shadow, Allow Popping and Invisible" are not affected by this option. I exeprienced some bugs previously, like having wirefence prisons not showing the prisonners inside, and I think this is because the flag Window was not applied correctly without the option.

What it means also, is that if you manually applied flags to tiles prior of using this function, all your work will be lost. EXAMPLE : You choose a specific wall or object and decided that it will be climable. Or you chose a special part of the map to make it Etherial as to prevent the player of accessing it. Or you made a secret wall Etherial for the player to sneak pass through it in a map. All those kind of small work will be lost as the tiles are being updated.

 

[RobertHouse]

"Update Tiles Used" was EXACTLY what I was talking about.

Happy you got it figured out Hugo!!

 

[nadeauhugo]

This is a revelation for me... I thought for a while that Ft Improver was somehow at the root of the problem as I experienced bug with it and quartermaster items before. Now everything works nicely!

I might actually even reevaluate some object-tiles to assign them « climable » flag by default, giving more opportunities to the maps... I’ll check this out eventually..