How can I efficiently create/store/implement animations as I add to my game?

Question

My game's characters are made up of different parts (head/body/legs/etc), and whatever items they have equipped. As I'm creating the animation system for my game, I want to try to anticipate a large number of combinations for different pieces for each character. Originally, I had planned on having a frame-by frame animation for each piece for each animation, and then layer them to combine them into a character, but this seems like it would be a lot of work for my artist, and that the memory/disk size would start to add up as well since we would need a sprite for every frame, of every customization of every piece, in every animation, for every character.

What efficient ways are there to create/implement these animations as we add more and more configurations to our game?

Edit: I'll also point out that my artist is using flash to make the graphics and animations, but the game is in Java (libgdx, but I can also hard code OpenGL if I need to).

Answer 1

You could create a structure of points where you can "attach" images. Then you could set these points according to the current frame. For example a simple hero character which can have different helmets and different melee weapons and has the animations "move" and "strike", for these animations you have a sprite sheet with everything except the weapon and the helmet, now you can take these sprite sheet and a text editor and note for each frame where the helmet and the weapon is, including rotation and maybe size too. Using this data you can dynamically compose the character.

Example code for better understanding:

heroSprite.drawFrame(curFrame);

int[] coordinatesX={4, 5, 6,  7, [...]};
int[] coordinatesY={8, 9, 10, 9, [...]};
int[] rotation={10, 15, 20, 15, [...]};
weaponSprite.setPosition(coordinatesX[curFrame], coordinatesY[curFrame]);
weaponSprite.setRotation(rotation[curFrame]);

weaponSprite.draw();

Answer 2

Have your artist create template animations using generic parts that can be swapped out.

If possible with libgdx, find each generic part (eg, with an instance name), and set visible=false for the generic part and addChild() the replacement part with copied position/rotation from the generic part.

Alternatively, have the artist save the generic animation with Choose File > Save As > Save as Type > uncompressed XFL. The XFL file format is a way to represent a Flash Professional document as an XML-based, open folder of files.

From the XFL folder, look at the positions and rotations in XML to build the tables as suggested by Mr. Beast. After you figure out the format, you could write a tool to do this automatically so that when animations are updated, you can quickly get them into the game.

Answer 3

I'd never found an answer to this question until recently with the Kickstarter project Spine.

It looks like it will do exactly what I'm asking :)