Hello, I am building a 2d multiplayer isometric rpg using LibGDX where the players and npcs can face north, south, east, and west. I’m currently using a walking spritesheet from http://gaurav.munjal.us/Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Generator/ which was easy enough to animate but I want to be able to dynamically equip the characters with weapons and armor and also sync that information over the network. The player will ideally be able to face 4 directions, sit, swing a sword, shoot a bow. These are all fine to do on a base sprite but the gear needs to attach properly during these animations.
The awful first solution I got working was to create a spritesheet for the weapon so that as the players hand moves in the animation, the weapon animates to follow the hand. This is just unsustainable to make a spritesheet with like 60+ frames for each piece of weapon and armor, also the overhead to load all these files and split them in to textureregions and animations I can see really destroying performance.
I have looked in to software like spline and spriter and it seems really complicated and mostly for just animating one side and flipping, so you have 2 directions.
I guess another option is to go 3d but I’m already pretty far in to making my game that starting over i 3d would be a huge setback.
I plan to use the same naked man spritesheet as the base for a lot of npcs so another idea I have is to make an array of the x and y of all the hand locations during the animation and then move the sword to that position in each frame, but then there’s also rotating the weapons as they move to look proper, and armor will have to line up to different leg positions, etc.
How do games such as Tibia accomplish this? Open to any solutions, thank you!