Need help with (simple) click to move/ RTS style movement

Questions
1

recently started to make a (very small scale) RTS but I’ve bumped up against something rather fast: there’s very little out there tutorial-wise for click-to-move in defold.

all I’ve managed to find myself is a tutorial that uses animations for it (which isn’t fit for purpose since I can’t cancel the animation halfway through and have the character move elsewhere) and one using Astar pathfinding that’s overkill for what I need (not many obstacles in my game) and doesn’t have the most clear presentation anyway.

All I have managed to do on my own so far is get the mouse coordinates and print them when I click. any help would be extremely appreciated.

1 Like
2

If you’re not using this asset as your starting point for creating an RTS game in defold, you should..

3

thanks for the reply, but I’m the type of insane individual who likes to make my own assets. the games I make feel more personal that way.

4

dont use those assets but see how they implemented the movement, learn from the example scripts

5

I create a sample “game” based on that asset pack a few years ago:

HTML5: Warbattles-RTS 0.0
Code: GitHub - britzl/warbattles-rts: RTS sample project for the Defold game engine

6

Ah, yes, the example project included with the assets will also be helpful!

7

oh, I thought it was just sprites. sorry about that. I’m looking through it now
this looks like what I want:

local function walk_path(self, unit)
	local pos = go.get_position(unit.id)
	local step = table.remove(unit.path, 1)
	if step then
		local to = pos + step
		msg.post(unit.id, "moving", { to = to })
		go.animate(unit.id, "position", go.PLAYBACK_ONCE_FORWARD, to, go.EASING_LINEAR, 1 / unit.data.speed, 0, function()
			walk_path(self, unit)
		end)
	end
end

is removing stuff from the table how you interrupt the ongoing animation? I can’t figure out why else that table.remove(unit.path) is there.

edit: this isn’t actually that different from the animation based one I found before, now that I’m figuring it out. two things: my sprite disappears when the animation is over, and as mentioned before idk how to interrupt it so I can click to change the direction while it’s moving

function init(self)
	msg.post(".", "acquire_input_focus")
end



function on_input(self, action_id, action)
	if action_id == hash("touch") and action.pressed then
		local mouse_pos = vmath.vector3(action.x,action.y,0)
		local obj_pos = vmath.vector3(go.get_position().x,go.get_position().y,0)
		go.animate(".", "position", go.PLAYBACK_ONCE_FORWARD, mouse_pos, go.EASING_LINEAR, 0.5, 0)
		print(action.x,action.y)
		print(obj_pos.x,obj_pos.y)
	end
end

this is what I’ve got now, after pruning out the parts I couldn’t figure out or don’t need to use. can’t figure out why the sprite would go invisible at the end.

8

You can interrupt go.animate using go.cancel_animations.

Alternatively, you can move your game object in the update function using speed , direction, velocity, dt etc

Probably because of z-fighting. If your background’s Z is 0, your sprite (actually your game object) might end up behind it.
Try using 0.1 for the Z value to your mouse_pos to test it.

9
10

you were right about the Z fighting, that was exactly it. and as it turns out, for some reason, the animation cancel isn’t a problem anymore. something I stole from that asset pack example you guys provided me with must work differently from the other one I found. and thanks for the video, I’ll look at that asap.

thank you everyone! :+1:

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