Isometric 8 Directional Movement Options?

[Majicpanda]

We are in the process of choosing technology for our next game which is an isometric hack and slash (Diablo style) tile based movement game and not quite sure if Unity 2D and/or tk2d will give us what we want.

- For 8 directional movement is the only option to create spritesheets of literally every armor weapon combo in the game you want for every animation and then make animations out of all of them manually in the editor?
-- Male_Plate_Chest_Leather_Helm_1h_Sword_Up_Idle, Male_Plate_Chest_Leather_Helm_1h_Sword_Up_Running, Male_Plate_Chest_Leather_Helm_1h_Sword_Up_Attack

This seems much easier than trying to swap the equipment at runtime and making layers for Plate_Chest_Up_Idle, Plate_Chest_Up_Attack but hopefully both are just completely wrong and there's an easier way.

The biggest issue we ran into on our last game with adding sprites to the characters at runtime was all the Z layers.. we had eyes, head, body, chest equipped, head equipped, mainhand, offhand, beard.. so like 9 z depths ranging from -.4 to .4 in local position on the character which really makes you have to fight to make sure things overlapping dont look crazy.

Edit: So it appears the possible proper way to do this is to create the 8 directional animations with empty hands, helm, and body.  You would then need to create all the armor on a personless spritesheet so it would be like Plate_Chest_Up_Idle like I mentioned, but how would you guarantee that the "character" animation for attacking matches the exact frame for "armor" animation for attacking frame for frame?

Thanks.

[unikronsoftware]

Use 3d models? Stuff like this is soooo much easier in 3d than in 2d...

The biggest issue we ran into on our last game with adding sprites to the characters at runtime was all the Z layers.. we had eyes, head, body, chest equipped, head equipped, mainhand, offhand, beard.. so like 9 z depths ranging from -.4 to .4 in local position on the character which really makes you have to fight to make sure things overlapping dont look crazy.

Use sorting order for this, much easier to control.

Edit: So it appears the possible proper way to do this is to create the 8 directional animations with empty hands, helm, and body.  You would then need to create all the armor on a personless spritesheet so it would be like Plate_Chest_Up_Idle like I mentioned, but how would you guarantee that the "character" animation for attacking matches the exact frame for "armor" animation for attacking frame for frame?

Write an animation controller that will play multiple animations simultaneously. If you want even more control, make a copy of the tk2dSpriteAnimator component, that will reference and link up and play animations on multiple sprites. Eg. one Play plays everything correctly and in sync.