Thanks,
Yeah, my attacks don’t work like that, I haven’t seen the Couch Knights stuff but from the sounds of it, that’s not what I do. I rely a bit more on the engine blending animations than making perfectly “tillable” animations, meaning my animations do not have a clean start and end based on what came before or after. So the animation blending takes care of that, to make them seamless.
So, I do call my animations using montage, but I don’t actually use montage to make loops of any kind. You can call any section at any time and that’s pretty much what I do. They don’t specifically string together, they just blend based on the blend timing I set in montage.
The way I animate the moves is with consideration for a combo window and a blend period. So at the end of each animation after the follow through, is a “hold” to allow for this. The start of each animation is actually a short hold already in the extreme position of the back swing to allow a blend in. So I don’t animate the back swing, that is taken care of by the blend in. This way I have way less animations to deal with, no transitions, just major moves, and don’t have to care too much about starts and ends being perfectly aligned. It take a load off animation work.
The way I control combo timing is through a delay, so as soon as I press attack, the delay starts and will reset all booleans associated with attack combo if it gets to finish the delay, unless I press attack again, in which case the delay restarts and never calls the reset. It’s a Retriggerable Delay, so as long as you keep pressing the attack, it can not reset and the combo is valid. The combo flow is controlled directly on the moves, each move in turn enables the next.
What the Gate actually does in the context you refer to, is control how quickly the next attack can be activated. Since you don’t want immediate input to activate the next attack, if you tap the attack key rapidly, you don’t want overlapping moves, you want that attack to play out and then you are allowed to do the next attack. Though I’ll mention that I’ve also changed that setup to go through a Branch in stead of a Gate, it still does exactly the same thing. So that’s also controlled through a delay, but this is not a retriggerable, it’s a straight delay. The input is actually disabled for a short delay to allow the move to complete, meanwhile the combo delay is still active and leaving a window open for a combo to be put into motion.
I hope that makes sense, I know it can sound convoluted trying to describe it… 