   Animation organization
  So im going to start creating all of my animations....and was wanting a bit of advice...right now im going with a file naming conventionRace_BodyPart_Item_Direction_Action.bmpso for human right hand sword North attack animation it would beHmn_Rhd_Swd_Nth_Atk.bmpthen all of these would be loaded into my sprite animations object and drawn according to state.   
  so what exactly is your question?  Are you just wondering if this is a good naming convention for your sprites?  Or do you need help on actually getting the sprites animated?  A little more clarification as to what exactly the problem is would be helpful.   ;  sorry about that...I am really just trying to not paint myself into a corner here.  I've thought about it quite a bit and I cant really think of anything else before i go code it.Ill need an object that holds animations for Head, Torso, Arms, hands, legs, feetall of this for each of the 8 directions and each action such as idle and attackWhen it comes time to draw my sprites...ill walk the list,pull the current frame and send it on its way.Does this sound like a fairly well rounded solution or am i missing something?;  This maybe be overkill for your needs but I will explain how our system works.We use a 'sheet' system, which is a data structure that defines the arangement of a group of frames, as well as other properties.an example of a sheet might be personWalk.sheet, which means it holds all of the frames neccisary for walking.a .sheet file is xml and a very simple one might look like this:<?xml version="1.0"?><sheet><row><frame><texture>data/personWalk0.png</texture><offsetx>0.5</offsetx><offsety>0.5</offsety><flipx>false</flipx><flipy>false</flipy></frame><frame><texture>data/personWalk1.png</texture><offsetx>0.5</offsetx><offsety>0.5</offsety><flipx>false</flipx><flipy>false</flipy></frame></row></sheet>Note how it is structured somewhat like an HTML table, the engine implicity uses rows as directions, so 8 rows correspond to 8 directions, the engine actually also handles more or less than 8 rows to directions as well.Note how each frame has offset and flip parameters, the offset parameters let you specify where the 'anchor point' on an image is, since this can vary from frame to frame is means your images need not be all the same size (space saving), the flip paramaeters are also handy, they let you specify if a frame should be flipped or not, this allows you to reuse animation frames in certain cases when all you need is a flip.to utilize a sheet file we have entity configuration files which can specify an 'animation' an animation is composed of a given sheet file, a row of that sheet file (or specify it to use your 'current direction') a frame range (0 to 9 for instance) and a loop count (-1 being infinite).in case you are wondering, I dont write these by hand, we have a tool which does the work for us, it actually takes the source frames and clips out their whitespace and properly creates offsets to keep them aligned (big space savings).this is a very robust way to store animation frames, but as I said it might be overkill for you.   ;  I did some work last night and came to a solution MUCH like this.In the same vein all of my files are generated via a small app and then binary serialized out to my data files...then the files are deserialized when i want to load the animation on startup.I serialize everything out ...this way i dont have to deal with anything when i want to save a map from my map editor...i just say....serialize and it takes everything an pushes it to a file/files, hands off :).My structure for animations is quite similar...i will steal your offset idea...i was wondering how i was going to get all of my parts back together in the right spot without making the images the same size :).thanks a lot EDI(would have used xml but .NET doesnt have a generics serializer and i dont have time to write one...binary will have to do for now!);  oh..i did want to ask....i see you have 1 personWalk.pngwhat do you do for different armor/weapons?   ;  thankfully I don't have to deal with such a mess =Dbut there are three solutions, either generate specialized graphics for all combinations (huge amount of data, but simple)the other is to allow for multiple entries per 'frame' and the order they are listed can be the draw order.and still another is that a given entity could make use of multiple sheets for given animationsperson1.sheet <- the basearmor1.sheet <- an armor overlaygloves1.sheet <- gloves... <-othersthe entity would load these and could either composite them once, or draw them each frame.but yeah i try to stay away from dynamic equipment change, the art overhead is ludicrous. =D   ;  I've taken the split it up into different files...ill have a file for all of the different parts of the body and just index into those images.Thanks for your help EDI