2D MMORPG Sprites Question

Development Character & Animation
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1

So me and my team have been looking for an engine to create a 2D MMORPG and wondering if we will hit a wall when it comes to 2D attachments to characters (equipment)
I’ve read up on this thread here, which was the only info/thread i could find on this subject.

What we have is a custom master sprite sheet of a character wearing almost nothing and in gimp i made layers for each type of equipment so i can hide/show and export the sprite sheet with/without the types of equipment (gloves, chest, legs, feet, eyes, hair, facial hair) so that the placement within the frame is placed exactly where it needs to be.

what i’m asking here, is there ways to attach these items or do you have to have a sprite sheet for each type/combination? meaning,
Base Body sprite with glove equipped only
Base body sprite with chest equipped only
Base body sprite with eye equipped only
Base body sprite with eye and glove equipped only
Base body sprite with chest and eye and glove equipped only

…and so on.

is it possible to overlay images onto the sprite/character without exporting 1000 of sprite combinations for each action (player equipping one piece and unequipping another)

2

ofcourse it’s possible. you’d make your props and animated paths for them. what I mean is that say you make your base character. then you basically animate the prop to follow it in its walk/run/stab/etc animations.

if this is all a bit unclear I can make a video explaining it. I cant do much right now, but I’ll be home in about 10 days

btw: do you use layered sprites (bones control different parts of model)
or do you use frame by frame animated sprites? just want to know so it’s easier to explain what you can do

I will also refer you to this:

3

, thank you for the reply, the link you provided really helped me understand all the approaches.

I made the sprites by hand so we use frame by frame method. A video explaining the method of attachments/overlays would be very helpful, once again, thank you!

4

I’m actually working on this as well with Decus and had some questions on it too. I’ve read the site provided, and had 3 questions from it…

1)How do you attach to a “node” the image and make sure it cycles through the sprite for each animation frame for the character. In other words, how, with a glove for armor, would you make it hit the next image when the next frame comes in the animation to make sure it follows it?

2)In even more hopefulness my next question is if you can patch together pieces of the character into an animation, inside unreal, and have variables hold the image name to set it, e.g. the arm is arm.png, the body is body.png, head is head.png, so on and so on, and these are stored in separate variables, that show up the images in the animation. If you equip the glove, it would replace the arm.png with glove1.png, so the animation is still in tact and it shows the glove instead of the arm, since it’s equipped. Is this possible in unreal? I’m very hopeful that it is at it would save even more time to just piece together the character for each frame in the animation and change the variables as needed for the armor. Also would be able to just slap the weapon in there as a piece too and change the weapon image name on the fly for equipping different weapons.

3)My third and final question is if, in either option above, you can set “z priority” so the images show up in front or behind other images in the sprite animations. A good example would be the right hand glove when looking left (on a top down game, with the aspect similar to Zelda: a link to the past where you can see from a ~180deg angle instead of directly down from the top) it should show behind the body, but on top of the left hand if you use the “node attachment” idea in that post. I’m not sure how that would be achieved unless you had priority settings by picking specific areas in the sprite animation itself, as both arms would be in the same image, and the attachment is separate. With the second way I posted above, there would still have to be priority to z or front/back for it to work right. Is this possible as well?

I really think #2 with the #3 required front/back z priorities would be the best option, but again there just isn’t much documentation about this stuff for unreal at all. Thanks in advance for any help too. :slight_smile:
I’m just not familar enough with unreal to know if any of this is provided in features through the engine or it’s api, or if it will have to be created from scratch to handle it.

***I got a lot of this answered by trial and failure and some help. I think I got it. :slight_smile: thanks guys.