2D/3D Shootem Up Enemy spawner with defined paths

[thorntonp72]

Hi,

I have been following the tutorials on playmaker by Romi Fauzi and the Enemy section goes into creating Spawn points and then moving the enemy through an Animation process, which you define the specific points for the ship including rotation etc.

Whilst this is really good, it seems like it would take me days to create just a single animations for every type of scenario, especially if I want to make it look nice and smooth and curved like the enemies in Skyforce, which all seem to be extremely smooth in their approach and exit routines. I am sure that is not how they do it in their design as it looks far too automated.

I have tried many ways to achieve the same result with Animations, but it's never quite right or smooth.

Does anyone know of a different way to achieve smooth and predictable enemy movement into and out of the screen other than doing step by step animations with Playmaker? I have looked for a playmaker plugin, but cannot see one.

Thank you,

Paul

[thorntonp72]

Update: I have been looking at the tutorials from

which is excellent and will probably do exactly what I am looking for.

I have managed to get my enemy to follow an exact path using Bezier Curves and it certainly flys along the path I gave it, so it fixes the smoothness of the flight path.

The problem I have though that as my game is going to be a 3D type shoot em up and the enemy does not turn or rotate based on the direction of the curve.

Any help on how to do that would be great as I feel I am about 50% there.

I thought about trying to do transform.rotation in the script and setting the direction and angle, but finding it very hard to work this out as it would vary on where the ship is on the PATH.

Maybe I would need to do some sort of timer animation?

I was sort of hoping that Playmaker would do this sort of stuff, but now I am ending up writing code

Thanks,

Paul

[colpolstudios]

Hey take a look at this:

should help.