Hello,

In the hopes that my thread is not off-topic or offensive in any way, I dare to ask the following "noob" question:

what would be the correct way to create sprite animations from 2D *.bmp files?

I have for reference the 2001 game  Desperados:Wanted Dead or Alive.

with the help of some tools i found , I was able to extract files containing what seems to be animation frames and frame shadow masks for animating a horse.

Attached are the archived assets.

My goal is to recreate the demo level of the game using Unity, for educational purposes.

I have started by loading the background map layer (also a large bmp file), and next step is to load a 2d character object and animate on the perspective.

Horse_Brown.rar

55 minutes ago, Catalin Danciu said:

what would be the correct way to create sprite animations from 2D *.bmp files?

Do you mean to ask how to make sprites? Formats won't matter much for the work flow, although it will impact quality.

Sprites are commonly arranged into sprite sheets. This way you can use any size of sprite and still get all the performance of a optimized texture.

With modern computers you can load them in one by one and use a sprite array to hold them. It's easier than messing with sprite sheets if you are a programmer.

1 hour ago, Catalin Danciu said:

My goal is to recreate the demo level of the game using Unity, for educational purposes.

I have started by loading the background map layer (also a large bmp file), and next step is to load a 2d character object and animate on the perspective.

Are you having any problems? I find that Unity is very simple to work with, it works exactly as you expect.

59 minutes ago, Catalin Danciu said:

I have for reference the 2001 game  Desperados:Wanted Dead or Alive.

The question here is can you do so legally? Often you will need to permission of the artist to do so, breaking files out of a game can also be considered illegal.

4 hours ago, Catalin Danciu said:

what would be the correct way to create sprite animations from 2D *.bmp files?

Latest Microsoft api for drawing sprites is DirectDraw that depricated at DX 7.0 and removed at DX 8.0. OpenGL  never have a sprite drawing API. Sprites can be easely simulated by 3D GAPI by maping texture to flat rectangular mesh maked from two triangles. It technicue is more powerful, becouse also give ability to stretch, rotate,  and do with sprite anything else, that can be done with planar 3D object.

@Catalin Danciu You mentioned using Unity. It's got an established pipeline for importing static or animated 2D assets, and a built-in sprite engine. The docs should help you:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/Sprites.html

Also, next time I suggest posting some the images directly so they're inline on your post for people to see. People are busy and won't download the archive, unpack it etc. just to see what's inside.

Good luck. Let us know how it goes.