[2.50] Eyeball Combos and Animation Skipping

Ok, I did some digging both here and PZC for any kind of documentation or understanding on this subject, and while I don't think I can definitively say this is a bug in the strictest sense, it's almost certainly unintended behavior that might need a look.

For the record, I'm using ZQuest 2.50 build 28 in Windows 10.

I want to make an animated Eyeball A combo. Simple enough, it's done like so:
http://puu.sh/tXl7x/36d319a898.png

The frames for each direction are laid out in order. However, due to me being contrary and somewhat lazy, I wanted each frame to have its directions listed in order:
http://puu.sh/tXlp9/cba564006c.png

I figured that animation skip would do this quite nicely, just set it to 7 and let it pick up on frame 2 after the directional images for frame one.

Nope, that would be easy.

For some reason, selecting animation skip has the intended effect of making the game look for all directions in order before looking for the next frame of animation, but the game still makes room for the frames of animation selected, even though it also looks for that animation after each complete set of directions. So to correctly animate an eyeball combo using animation skip, you are required to do this:
https://puu.sh/tXiQf/909cbf6382.png

This doesn't seem to be intended behavior, it almost seems like ZQ is only half-implementing the skip by correctly ordering the directions but not disabling the buffer between directions meant for animation without the skip.

How is the eyeball combo supposed to know the starting tile for each direction's animation?

Currently the first frame is N + 4*i, where N is the combo's tile and i is the direction (i=0 for up, 1 for up-right, etc). The animation then obeys the x and y skip values for each direction.

It sounds like you want to change the base frame for each direction to be N + i instead. But I'm not sure how ZC is supposed to figure this out without some extra information from the user (e.g. a "stride" parameter that is 4 by default, and that you want to set to 1).

Is there really a need to support unusual tile layouts for these combos?

I don't know, really, it just seems really odd behavior for the animation skip property to create.
What is animation skip on the eyeball combo supposed to do? Am I just doing it incorrectly? Or was it never intended to be used that way?

The way to think about it is that the eyeball combo creates 8 different and independent animations.
Each animation has a start tile. From that start tile, the animation proceeds normally (including skipping in the x and y direction).
But the start tile is currently hardcoded to have a stride of 3. So that the north eyeball animation starts at the combo's tile, the north-east eyeball animation starts four to the right of the combo's tile, etc.

The part you want to change is the start tile for the animations. Instead of starting at tile +0, +3, +6, etc. you want to tell ZC to start at +0, +1, +2, etc. There is no easy way of doing this currently, though on the future with scriptable combos it would be easy to add a parameter that tells ZC the stride length of the starting tiles.

I see. Thanks for the explanation. idontknow's tutorial is really the only thing I could find on the subject, and it didn't really touch on the skip. I'm guessing that the animation skip just doesn't really work with eyeballs, and I'm just going to have to animate them normally. It's not a big deal, I was more curious why it wasn't working. Thanks again for clearing that up.