Spriter performance question

Heya

Had an idea rumbling around in my head for a few years without ever touching it as I felt it was above my skills, though as I get more experienced with game design, it's something I think about more and more, and now that I've discovered C2, I ask myself if it's an engine that would fit this type of idea.

Anyway, got a hypothetical question regarding this idea. I wanted to create a game that potentially has a lot of characters on screen at once, thinking up to 30, and have the potential for each character to be visually different.

With Spriter, I could see this working well as I can rig up my animations once and set the sprites to switch out to change things like hair, weapons, skin tone and clothing without too much trouble. This would give a nice amount of variation to the characters on screen, and would also allow additions later on to increase the variance if I wanted. If I went with sprites, I'm pretty sure the system could handle this if all the characters are being loaded off the same sheet, but spritesheets can be pretty limited as you can't really make little adjustments to characters without redrawing the whole sheet. And even if I did have a bunch of different sheets (say 10 all up), I wonder what the impact on the performance would be by having so many loaded in at once.

My question is about performance. If each character has 16 bones, and there's 30 characters, that's going to equate to 480 bones on screen at once. Seems like a lot, and I'm wondering if C2 can even handle something like that.

Has anyone worked with Spriter in C2 and can give feedback on performance with large numbers of bones on screen at once?

I haven't worked with Spriter and a lot of characters on screen at once, but it shouldn't be too hard to test. I just tried to but I've always found Spriter to be a bit temperamental and I may not have the latest plugin installed so wasn't able to get it going but my suggestion would be to download a pre-rigged spriter character (this can be done from one of the menus in spriter), load it into construct. And then at the start of the layout make a loop that duplicates the object x times at a random position on the screen and sets an animation. Then see how that runs, it should give you a pretty good idea. Obviously performance will also be dependant on how many unique sprites you're using, but it will at least give you a decent idea of the overhead that the rigging/animation uses.