[crossfire] Face "overlays"

[Mark Wedel]

On 07/13/11 01:25 PM, Nicolas Weeger wrote:
>>    My question here is does this means that each of those combos above
>> (overlay_armour_fenx_player_sword, overlay_rage_fenx_player) correspond to
>> a unique face/png image on the server?
>
> I see animations and overlays working like that:
> - player has a standard animation, "fenx_player"
> - each action (using skill or item) can have a temporary animation, like it is
> currently ; thus "fenx_player_sword" or "fenx_player_spellcasting"
> - each equippable item defines an overlay ; so "armour" would give the
> "overlay_armour" face on top of the player's face
>
> Of course, items can be specialized for player ; so "overlay_armour" could be
> "overlay_armour_fenx_player_spellcasting" for a specific spellcasting
> animation, or "overlay_armour_fenx_player" for the general armour.
>
>
> With fallback so not have to explicitely define everything.
>
>
>
>
>>    Or is there some level of trickiness going on with how the client
>> assembles those faces?
>
> I see it merely as adding new pictures on top of the player's "main" face.

  But is the client assembling these images, or have all these images been 
pre-assembled on the server (and thus, they are valid images)?

  If the client is left to do this layering, then somehow, it needs to know what 
faces to layer for any given object (typically players, but one could see reason 
to add this to monsters).

  From my reading, which could be wrong, it sounds like the server would have 
these composite images - thus, the server itself would have a lot more images, 
but really no change in the protocol is needed - the server would just know to 
use different faces and send those to the client, which would just display it.

  For a small number of combinations, that works pretty well.  But if you start 
to have multiple things you may layer, the combinations multiply up pretty fast. 
  For example, weapon + armor + aura could be hundreds of new images (say 5 
weapons, 5 armors, and 5 auras = 125).  These would all have to either be images 
in the arch directory tree, or created during the collect process.

  I'd personally think that having the client do the layering would be much 
better - one could have the number of combinations be much larger without having 
issues (eg, 10 armors x 10 weapons x 10 auras x 50 monsters = 50,000 image combos).