Alright, I was just thinking of ways to make players select different armors and weapons. I was thinking of various ways and I basically got stuck. And I would need a programmers point of view on this. Alright, in my first example, is Diablo2. Now, I know how this is done because I'm currently doing it on a game project for a job. Which is basically pre-rendering. And I know how much work has to go into doing these custom things for each type of clothing. It's easy enough to do, but very time consuming. Unless you have access to a great renderfarm... Anywho, my original idea for a game I'm creating was making the game sprites based off of flash. And I thought in my head it would be easier ( using actual hand drawn animation, not just symbols moving around ), but then, I kinda got confused... See, when you do the 3d renders, you can basically layer stuff on top of each other for the final effect. And it won't change much of the final image, considering everything is lined up properly in the render. Since you basically render every object seperate, what the camera sees, is what you get. It's easy to simply add a weapon and hit render and have everything align... for the 2d method...I'm not too sure how I could go about making it easy to create alphas for each seperate piece of clothing, depending on what I see on the screen...I'd pretty much have to merge layers and undo and repeat for a bunch of pieces I assume... for example: My sprite has an armor, and a weapon. Now, if I change the armor...and I have some frames where the weapon is hidden behind that armor. I'll have to draw the frames where the weapon is behind the armor of course. But I'd have to do the same thing for all the armor if they're a different shape. Which would be more work than the pre-rendered method above I believe...or am I wrong about how that could work? I guess there should be a way to create alphas using masks in flash that could make this work... Also, one last method, is from WoW. I'm not too sure what type of system they used for adding geometry/textures to the models, but yeah, it simply looks like they add geometry/change textures for the various armors and whatnot. It's been a while since I last played though so I can't just hop in there and see for myself anymore to try and guess. I guess the real question I'm asking is: Which is simpler for adding multiple options for armors,weapons, etc? The pre-rendered method, the sprite method , or the WoW method? I know they all take work, since I've been doing the pre-rendered method above for a project other company I work for are doing...but I've never done the other methods yet. So I don't really know what's involved in them. I'd really love to find a way to make it possible using the flash method, but I'm willing to sacrifice the look for something that's easier and faster to do.

The WoW method you're talking about is using a number of 3D object and skins... Most 3D games use this and most are very easy to mod in the right hands as basic 3D shapes can be used to represent a lot of different types of clothes...for example the difference between a body suit and a t-shirt is a skin that is very easily switched in and out.

For my project, I define polygon material sections on the 3D skinmesh for the chest, abs, waist, thighs, knees, shins, feet, shoulders, elbows, forearms, hands, neck, and head of each body or suit. The sections are just normal polygons, welded together normally, but with the part material lines in very similar places on each suit. When I render, I can hide certain sections of one suit when another suit is worn over it, then combine everything that remains to render it all at once with a single material. If I didn't hide the underneath layers, some suits would definitely cause problems, poking through the layer above them when the character bends around.

I've had to recover from a few mistakes in the design here and there, and you can occasionally spot cracks in-between the suits when the character does crazy maneuvers. Other than those rare problems, it's worked pretty well for me. It's not difficult at all to sub-divide the mesh into multiple material sections as long as it's planned out from the beginning.

You can see some screenshots of my game in progress here.