how to: changeable weapons etc.

[Dariorox]

Hi everybody,

I'm starting a new game and I was wondering what could be the best way to have changeable weapons, and possibly armors.
I mean, if i create carachters with all the possible combinations it's gonna be dozens of carachters! But... if I'd use different objects for the chest, the hands and weapons etc... it's gonna be a mess, a "coding mess" and "animating mess"!

Any idea?

Thanks in advance!

[DavidN]

Having separate objects for each part of your character would definitely be the easiest way to do it - this way you don't have to worry about including every possible combination. Whether you have an actual separate object for every component, or have one object for each one with several different animation, is up to you and depends on how you want to organize it.

As fas as events go, it would probably be easiest to have a group for each weapon etc. selectable, and to activate and deactivate them when the player picks up or selects a new one.

[MODule]

Most commercial games that have this kind of feature use seperate sprites(objects in MMF) for body, weapon and armor. You'd need to animate your objects so you can put them on top of eachother.
One suggestion would be to use hotspots wisely so you just have to set your objects positions to your character's position. Your weapon's and armor's animations would be stopped and you'd set their animations and frames to those of your character object(not sure how well this would work. There might be a lag between character and equipment animation). It might seem like a lot of coding, but once you've got it working for one object it shouldn't be too much work to do the other objects. And besides, you can use groups, so you don't have to copy-and-paste your code to every single weapon and armor.
Hope that helps.

[Dariorox]

yes mmm tough problem... I'll try my best! Thanks guys!