Loop animation through button presses - MegaMan X shooting

Hi everyone,

I'm making MegaMan X in Unity2D as a practice (still fairly new, have only made a few small games). I have movement and jumping sorted with animation, as well as shooting with animation.

The problem is, I am trying to replicate Mega Man X where if you press shoot again while still in the shoot animation, it doesn't transition back to the idle animation. I can't for the life of me figure out how to achieve this.

Any thoughts?
This is what I currently have (achieves the goal of showing a shoot animation when mouse is clicked).

Code (CSharp):

1. using System.Collections;
2. using System.Collections.Generic;
3. using UnityEngine;
4.  
5. public class PlayerShoot : MonoBehaviour
6. {
7.     private bool _isShooting = false;
8.     Animator _anim;
9.  
10.     public Transform _firePoint;
11.     public GameObject _bulletBasePrefab;
12.  
13.  
14.     private void Awake()
15.     {
16.         _anim = GetComponent<Animator>();
17.     }
18.  
19.     // Start is called before the first frame update
20.     void Start()
21.     {
22.  
23.     }
24.  
25.     // Update is called once per frame
26.     void Update()
27.     {
28.         if (Input.GetButtonDown("Fire1"))
29.         {
30.             _anim.SetBool("isShooting", true);
31.             Shoot();
32.            
33.         }
34.     }
35.  
36.     IEnumerator ShootBoolFalse()
37.     {
38.         yield return new WaitForSeconds(0.3f);
39.         _anim.SetBool("isShooting", false);
40.     }
41.  
42.     void Shoot ()
43.     {
44.         Instantiate(_bulletBasePrefab, _firePoint.position, _firePoint.rotation);
45.         StartCoroutine(ShootBoolFalse());
46.        
47.     }
48.  
49. }
50.  
51.  

 

From what I've seen you don't really need a coroutine for this. I've modified the code a bit. I haven't tried it myself but its how I would first try this.

Code (CSharp):

1. using System.Collections;
2. using System.Collections.Generic;
3. using UnityEngine;
4. public class PlayerShoot : MonoBehaviour
5. {
6.     private bool _isShooting = false;
7.     private float _buttonPressTimer = 0f;
8.     Animator _anim;
9.     public Transform _firePoint;
10.     public GameObject _bulletBasePrefab;
11.     private void Awake()
12.     {
13.         _anim = GetComponent<Animator>();
14.     }
15.     // Start is called before the first frame update
16.     void Start()
17.     {
18.     }
19.     // Update is called once per frame
20.     void Update()
21.     {
22.         if (Input.GetButtonDown("Fire1"))
23.         {
24.             _buttonPressTimer = 1f;
25.             Shoot();        
26.         }
27.          _buttonPressTimer = Mathf.Clamp(_buttonPressTimer-1f*Time.deltaTime,0,1f);
28.          _isShooting = (_buttonPressTimer > 0) ? true : false;
29.         _anim.SetBool("isShooting", _isShooting);
30.     }
31.     void Shoot ()
32.     {
33.         Instantiate(_bulletBasePrefab, _firePoint.position, _firePoint.rotation);
34.     }
35. }

The way it should work is in update every time it detects your fire button, you set the time to 1f. We then subtract by Time.deltaTime * however fast you want this timer to run. _isShooting will be equal to true or false based on the timer, and the animator will have a bool set based on the _isShooting bool since I noticed that wasn't even used in the original script.

 

Worked perfectly, thank you so much. I'm like 50% sure I understand it, I'll study the code and your reply. Legend!

 

Just so I don't leave you hanging on explanation too much

I basically used a bunch of shorthand to make the code cleaner

Code (CSharp):

1. _isShooting = (_buttonPressTimer > 0) ? true : false;
2.  
3. //Same as
4.  
5. if(_buttonPressTimer > 0){
6. _isShooting = true;
7. } else {
8. _isShooting = false;
9. }

and Mathf.Clamp is just a nice way to make sure our timer stays withing the bounds of numbers between 0 and 1f.

saying

_buttonPressTimer-1f * Time.deltaTime 

inside the clamp was a nice way of decreasing the timer without making a whole other line saying

_buttonPressTimer-=1f * Time.deltaTime;

.

Just makes the code look a little cleaner