Ashley - That's what I thought; but it seems that whenever the sprites are onscreen, things get really laggy when around 5+ characters enter the screen. I've not optimised it so that characters are deactivated offscreen, so they behave just as they would onscreen and offscreen as of now, but it's just when the character is being rendered onscreen that it lags badly. Iirc I can get about 30 characters possibly whilst they are offscreen. I'm not sure why. The only event that is run at every tick is a "For Each" loop for each and every clothing sprite, to position itself on the character, and set its angle to the bodypart that it is on.
Everything else, layering, changing animation, changing animation frame, all happens on the "On frame changed" trigger from the body of the character. I've done other small things too, like disable collisions for the clothing sprites, but it hasn't done too much lol.
Thanks for your input!