I'm considering working on game paying homage to games like Elder Scrolls Dagger Fall, using GG. However I have some concerns before I consider going forward. I'd like all NPC's and enemies to be flat images (that always face the player) but animate based off their sprite position within their diffuse map. For example like how the animated decals work but am wondering if its possible to animate via script; for things like walking animation and attacking and things like that?

Someone did a pretty good job in Unity: http://www.dfworkshop.net/web_demos/direnni-demo/direnni-demo.html. Even the enemy NPC's animate well.

Another thing I'm concerned about is things like foliage, rocks and tree.,Which would be decals that always face the player. Would this mean they would use more memory than a static complex 3d static object? I know there is a decal_facing.lua script of which will make an object always face the player, but wondering if running an AI script with it would work?

In the screenshot is what I have in GG using some test pixelated textures (except for floor). Looks pretty nice with spec and norm maps, oddly enough. I'm just curious if 2D creatures is possible with AI to allow them to move towards the player or navigate paths -- and the ability to animate them off a DDS sprite sheet.

Good call Teabone, and I am sure you will find your solution. I am also stepping back from 512x512 texture maps in many areas.
Not sure if this info may help https://www.quora.com/In-video-game-development-is-it-easier-to-make-2D-sprite-animations-or-a-rigging-3D-model

All the best and looking forward to seeing more.

If you can script, then 2D AI is possible I would imagine. It's no different to a 3D model really, just a single plane with an image. Of course at the moment you will be limited as what you can do, but for the type of game you are emulating probably fairly simple. The big job is getting all those animations done. No way to use a sprite sheet as far as I know in GG though, without using a shader, which is possible, although not sure how you could control it via your script if you did.

Foilage and trees are no problem and no, they take up no more memory than a 3D object, probably less given their lack of geometry.

I am able to make an interactive 2D NPC that always faces the player with a looping animation. However, he is always animating rather than being triggered to animate and stop. I'm using one of the decal shaders for this. I guess this will take a lot of playing around with the fx files to change up the seed and such. No idea how to trigger what sprite to load within a DDS though. This would be a complex LUA problem to sort im sure and I'm not very good at LUA myself.



The pixel styled textures work out quite well and they don't seem to blur either. I'm using a 512 x 256 example texture that repeats on the walls. I'm assuming if I use an incredibly small texture size and scale it up on the object's surface it may blur. Untested though.

Yeah its a really cool approach. Not something I am game to try myself. Though I will be backing this project 100% and I hope you get some solutions soon.

Using scaling in FPE doesn't seem to blur the image. So we can actually make very small resolution textures and than just enlarge them in GG rather than in photoshop/gimp.

Here is a test using daggerfall sprites. They always face the player. Will be interesting to see how they look using decal animations with them walking.



not sure how many people would interested in this type of stylization but its good to know it is possible.



Would need this if I were to create enemies that use an attack animation within their walking sprite. I think in FPSC it was possible to trigger shaders. Something to do with the two FPI commands selectshadervariable=# and setshadervariable=#. not sure GG has anything like this though in LUA.

Yeah looks great, thumbs up !