I was wondering how games like Baldurs Gate/Diablo handle the chnaging of the character''s graphic according to the weapon they carry and the clothing they wear?? This seems like a daunting task as I think about it. I can''t imagine them using a whole new character sprite for each weapon, etc. Anyway, I think this is a cool feature and I would love to hear any ideas on how it''s done. Thanks. Marcus

one way to do it is having a new graphic set for each color, not very flexible. another way is to re-render the graphics each time you change the color of them. having a palettized 256 colors image stored in memory and then just draw it to the surface according to the information in the palette. this way you would only have to use another palette or update it to change colors. thats the only two ways i can think of at the moment.

You could use compiled sprites and call the function with a color parameter.

Mike

In ultima online they have a sprite for each item of clothing,weapons,armor or whatever and their all animated. then they have the base character sprite thats not wearing anything and they render each article of clothing and weapons and armor onto in the right order, so you have the effect of a single sprite.

Baldur's Gate and Diablo both have every different equipment configuration rendered as separate graphics. In Diablo, there's only 3 possibilities for armour per character class. I'm not sure about the weapons, but there's only about 5 different looks for those, so this would only come to a total of 15 animation sets per class. As for Baldur's Gate, if I remember correctly, every single combination is rendered separately (this is part of the reason the game comes on 5 CDs I imagine). If you can't render or store all these graphics, you can use the Ultima Online method, but it is reliant on the graphics being very precise (there's a lot of screw ups in Ultima, just because of the potential number of combinations of clothing). Basically it's a tradeoff between beautiful graphics and more memory usage (or disk access) or customisation and a bit of a speed hit in the drawing. Obviously in a multiplayer game like UO, having many people on the screen at once, having a greater level of customisation is desirable, whereas in a primarily single, or small multiplayer game, graphical splendour is more important.

Good luck

Starfall

Edited by - Starfall on 1/31/00 10:33:48 PM