Looking cool, I loved Syndicate - I even had a soft spot for Syndicate Wars on the PS, especially on multiplayer mode!
I suggest that you store each different head and it's different views as an image each, then have a generic animated body and paste the head on top - should save a lot of hassle. You need the body as images, for each direction and each frame of animation, so that you can simply paste the character onto the screen correctly.
The tricky bit is Z depth sorting though, because your little guys can walk behind buldings, you need to sort out the correct drawing order. You can easily get the tile location that the guys are standing on, so this can be used when drawing the tiles, when your drawing each tile, you have to check if there's any guys on the tile and draw them afterwards, but before the next row of tiles is drawn.
So, in Psuedo code:
for z=0 to 32
for x=0 to 32
paste tile for x,z
for guy=0 to 10
if guy is standing on tile x,z then paste guy
next guy
next x
next z
This is a pretty damn sloppy way to do it, but it's probably the easiest too - if you don't have too many characters, you can get away with it, otherwise I'd look into limiting the guy check (for example, before stepping through the X coordinates, do a check to see if there's any guys in that Z row, if there aren't you don't need to do the check at all).
It should'nt be a big deal to get some movement going, if your stuck - you know where to send it
.
Van-B
My cats breath smells of cat food.
