Isometric unit animation setup on RTS

Is there any difference really if I put all unit animations to same sprite or would it be better to make separate sprites memory wise?

Or could it cause some other issues. I was thinking around 30-40 units.

I put all my animations to a individual characters in 1 sprite. (logical really) Cos when I name that character, i can reference it by it during my program, and you can reference individual animations within that sprite.

Simply add all animations relating to 1 units in 1 sprite.

I would makke a sepperate layout (somthing like objects layout), and place the units on there.

And spawn/create them on the needed layouts.

Some notes:

Isometric is a tough cookie when it comes to decent imagery supporting 8 directional movement with animations, file size wise that is.

I have lots of animations, 8 directions, 8 frames per animation.

So each animation, for any single one character is at least 64 images.

In my current project: boad game, I have 7 characters, each character has 5 animations (idle, walk, attack, being hit, and death)

The images used are relatively small as I cropped the white space. (approx 120x150)

All in all, these 7 characters, 5 animations each, 8 angles, 8 frame per animation, already take up roughly ~50mb

Yeah, true. But it's fun as hell playing that.

shinkan

wow 16 directions xD

18 animations ????

I just saw one with the walking.

I downloaded it and tried :) looks sweet hehe, didnt run into any enemies though, collected a bunch of boxes.

I tried glancing in your soldiers sprite, but it also has the game inside ;)

soldier sprite is something like a "demo" where all directions and animations are presented in interactive way.

I made this soldier for sale, demo was created just to show sprites and game example to show how they behave in action :)

shinkan, thats pretty smart, great demo :)

lennaert Thank You! :)

shinkan, Nice Cannon fodder style game <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

lennaert, I usually like to have as few different sprites as possible. Maybe I could try to but them on same at first and if it causes any performance issues then make them individual.

The images are only really bloating your projects size. It doesnt directly affect your performance.   It does however, if its simply way too big and the device it runs on has small memory or a terrible (or none) memory manager.

In my time with construct 2, the only real performance problems are programming approaches and flaws made by the developer.

That board game of mine, 50mb, on my laptop it runs 50/60fps wwith only ~10% cpu usage :)

Katala bare in mind that if Sprite is present in layout it will be loaded completely into memory. All animations and all frames.

If you want to have 30-40 different units I propose to make them as a separate objects. Or group them in few sprites.

shinkan, Main thing for me was basically that if there is one sprite with all animations or every separate unit sprite on the layout there would be basically no difference. The game should work even with every unit on the layout.

That 30-40 is quite rough estimate. I was planning to do most of the units from 2-3 sprites. For example a tank would basically be turret and base both with only one animation to 31 directions.

Ok then, I was only answering your original question about memory - was thinking about 30-40 units with few animations and frames.

But in that case I' would put them on separate objects and control them all using family - regarding to movement and variables.

shinkan, Ok thank. I think I could just put them separate sprites.

Here is one test I did a while ago.

Isometric RTS tank test

Test

move = left mouse

insert wall = right mouse

remove wall = middle mouse

insert target = T (mouse

Katala That's a nice start! If you aiming for "realism" you will need to have 32 frames for directions. Or maybe 16 would be enough? games don't need to be real after all ;)

shinkan, Thanks. I tested 16 but it was maybe a bit too few. Infantry should be ok with just 8. There would maybe be too many frames for any more. Just hopefully I don't have to start mirroring them then I would lose my shadows <img src="smileys/smiley19.gif" border="0" align="middle" />