[Actually I figured it out before posting] Need help STOPPING a sprite animation, not its ability to be animated

Hey, so I’m like programming or something and I’m trying to animate my player sprite so it looks like it’s walking. I’ve got something like this:

DEF P_ANIM SX,SY’SX and SY are circle pad coordinates
 IF SX>0 && (SPCHK(0)!=#CHKI || P[4]<0) THEN’P[4] represents the player’s x-velocity component
  SPANIM 0,”I”,”@P_RIGHT_WALK”
 ELSEIF SX<0 && (SPCHK(0)!=#CHKI || P[4]>0) THEN
  SPANIM 0,”I”,”@P_LEFT_WALK”
 ELSEIF SX==0 && SPCHK(0)==#CHKI THEN
  SPSTOP 0’!!!
 ENDIF
END

@P_RIGHT_WALK
‘Unimportant animation stuff :)

The big problem I see is with SPSTOP. It seems to put the sprite in a state of not being animated at all until SPSTART is called, even if I call SPANIM in order to start the animation again. The question is, is there a way to stop an animation without changing the sprite’s ability to be animated? And as I just figured out, there is, and tbh it’s kind of not very intuitive, at least the way I see it. But it is possible and makes sense.

SPSTOP 0 -> SPCHR 0,496

Instead of calling SPSTOP, I just had to use a different sprite function to set that specific trait of the sprite to a resting state. In this case, since I was animating the sprite’s definition number, I just reset that to the “not walking” sprite. And now it works how I want it to. My last question is what are some practical applications of SPSTOP? I can think of maybe a few situations where it might be useful, such as in an interactive cutscene where you want to stop everything until the player presses a button or something, but other than that I can’t think of anything.

My last question is what are some practical applications of SPSTOP? I can think of maybe a few situations where it might be useful, such as in an interactive cutscene where you want to stop everything until the player presses a button or something, but other than that I can’t think of anything.

The best application I can think of is a pause menu. If you set the sprite’s animation loop to 0, it will animate indefinitely. This looks pretty choppy if your pause menu overlays the screen. You could include a conditional animation stop in a sprite function (that is called every frame in the main loop), but it would be much more simple/cleaner to use SPSTOP. Edit: in one of my wip games that I might not continue, there is a “time stop” spell that stops the animation and movement of all sprites. That’s a neat application too.