Hi all,

I'm having a bit of trouble working out how to handle transitioning from one player state to another using an ECS, particularly with respect to determine the next animation to play.

For example, some of my current approach includes logic such as:

-> input system processes key down (left)
-> raises "intent event (left)"
-> intent system sets player vel.x
-> raises "started moving (left)" event
-> animation system plays appropriate animation

Now I have introduced jumping/falling, I'm not sure how to handle situations like the following:

In the collision system:

Player lands on ground, should we play the running animation or the idle animation? Depends on whether left/right input is held (which only the input system knows about). Or we could look at the player's x acceleration (but this doesn't necessarily mean left/right input is down, it could be due to some other force).

Do I raise an event to tell the input system the player has landed which then checks the current input state?

Do I need some sort of player state enum (within a state component?). Is there a corresponding state system, or is it up to all the other systems to update this as necessary?

Then there's situations such as when the player finishes firing a gun, should we change to running or idle animation? What drives this change, the animation system when the "fire" animation finishes?

All advice welcome as always,

Thanks

I wrote an article about animation handling and input a few years back, maybe it's of use to you:

On 4/6/2019 at 5:16 PM, Alberth said:

I wrote an article about animation handling and input a few years back, maybe it's of use to you...

Cheers for that, a very interesting read.

I definitely think (a) state machine(s) are looking promising. I've started off with a simple one.

I wasn't sure how things that happen outside of user input would work alongside a state machine, so for now I've just hooked the state machine into the event bus so it can receive events from other parts of the game code.

So for example, when the collision system detects than the player has landed on a platform, it sends a "landed" event which the state machine picks up. The "falling" state responds to this event and transitions the player into either an idle or running state after it checks the current keys pressed.

One thing I've noticed is that currently I have "LeftRunning" and "RightRunning" states, which obviously share nearly identical code, just with the directions reversed. I'm not sure yet whether to create a single "Running" state and parameter-ise it with a direction or not.