Original Post
Alright, I was just thinking of ways to make players select different armors and weapons. I was thinking of various ways and I basically got stuck. And I would need a programmers point of view on this. Alright, in my first example, is Diablo2. Now, I know how this is done because I'm currently doing it on a game project for a job. Which is basically pre-rendering. And I know how much work has to go into doing these custom things for each type of clothing. It's easy enough to do, but very time consuming. Unless you have access to a great renderfarm... Anywho, my original idea for a game I'm creating was making the game sprites based off of flash. And I thought in my head it would be easier ( using actual hand drawn animation, not just symbols moving around ), but then, I kinda got confused... See, when you do the 3d renders, you can basically layer stuff on top of each other for the final effect. And it won't change much of the final image, considering everything is lined up properly in the render. Since you basically render every object seperate, what the camera sees, is what you get. It's easy to simply add a weapon and hit render and have everything align... for the 2d method...I'm not too sure how I could go about making it easy to create alphas for each seperate piece of clothing, depending on what I see on the screen...I'd pretty much have to merge layers and undo and repeat for a bunch of pieces I assume... for example: My sprite has an armor, and a weapon. Now, if I change the armor...and I have some frames where the weapon is hidden behind that armor. I'll have to draw the frames where the weapon is behind the armor of course. But I'd have to do the same thing for all the armor if they're a different shape. Which would be more work than the pre-rendered method above I believe...or am I wrong about how that could work? I guess there should be a way to create alphas using masks in flash that could make this work... Also, one last method, is from WoW. I'm not too sure what type of system they used for adding geometry/textures to the models, but yeah, it simply looks like they add geometry/change textures for the various armors and whatnot. It's been a while since I last played though so I can't just hop in there and see for myself anymore to try and guess. I guess the real question I'm asking is: Which is simpler for adding multiple options for armors,weapons, etc? The pre-rendered method, the sprite method , or the WoW method? I know they all take work, since I've been doing the pre-rendered method above for a project other company I work for are doing...but I've never done the other methods yet. So I don't really know what's involved in them. I'd really love to find a way to make it possible using the flash method, but I'm willing to sacrifice the look for something that's easier and faster to do.