8-Directional Movement/Animation
Problem
You need a 2D character that has 8-directional movement, including animation.
Solution
For our example, we’ll use the Isometric Mini-Crusader, which contains 8-directional animations for idle, run, attack, and several other states.
The animations are organized in folders, with a separate image for each frame. We’ll use an AnimatedSprite and we’ll name each animation based on its direction. For example, idle0 pointing to the right and going clockwise to idle7.
When our character moves, it will pick an animation based on the direction of movement:
We’ll use the mouse to move - the character will always face the mouse and run in that direction when we click the mouse button.
To choose which animation to play, we need to get the mouse direction and map it to this same range of 0-7. get_local_mouse_position().angle() gives us the angle to the mouse (in radians). Using stepify() to snap this to the closest multiple of 45° (PI/4 radians) gives the following result:
Divide each by 45° (PI/4 radians), and we have:
Finally, we need to map the resulting range to 0-7 using the modulus (%) operator, and we’ll have our correct values. Adding that value to the end of the animation name (“idle”, “run”, etc) gives us the correct animation:
func _process(delta):
current_animation = "idle"
var mouse = get_local_mouse_position()
a = stepify(mouse.angle(), PI/4) / (PI/4)
a = wrapi(int(a), 0, 8)
if Input.is_action_pressed("left_mouse") and mouse.length() > 10:
current_animation = "run"
move_and_slide(mouse.normalized() * speed)
$AnimatedSprite.animation = current_animation + str(a)
Keyboard input
If you’re using keyboard controls instead of mouse, you can get the angle of movement based on which keys are being held. The rest works in the same way.
func _process(delta):
current_animation = "idle"
var input_dir = Vector2.ZERO
if Input.is_action_pressed("right"):
input_dir.x += 1
if Input.is_action_pressed("left"):
input_dir.x -= 1
if Input.is_action_pressed("down"):
input_dir.y += 1
if Input.is_action_pressed("up"):
input_dir.y -= 1
input_dir = input_dir.normalized()
if input_dir.length() != 0:
a = input_dir.angle() / (PI/4)
a = wrapi(int(a), 0, 8)
current_animation = "run"
move_and_slide(input_dir * speed)
$AnimatedSprite.animation = current_animation + str(a)