If not best practices, could someone provide an example?

The issues that I'm facing are that the artist I'm working with and I have a player character that we want to animate that will be around 32 wide by 64 high.

He may have a spear, which may be 128 long.

Should we create one sprite sheet for that character with all of the animation stuff manually specified with xml or should we create three sheets, 64x64, 128x128, 256,256, etc?

EDIT: Think like secret of mana, evermore, beyond oasis.

The issue is since java draws from top left coordinates then we'll have to be constantly concerned about the offset of the sprite since his location will be in reality x and y away from the location that the top left of his sprite needs to be drawn at.

I think I understand what you are saying. Although I I may not be the best person to answer this.

Basically the drawing will be all screwy because the top left corner you are drawing from is changing do to different sized sprites.

One idea is to have a default size for all sprites for a character, say 64*64, even though the walk animation may only be 32*64.

The other is to have any spears/weapons/magic have their own sprite and be drawn on top of the character. This may make collisions for attacking easier.

The last idea would be to calculate the offset for the different sized sprites and add/subtract them from your drawing coordinates.
This I think is the best.

Here is a video to show what I think is going on for those with more expertise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJPe6cWIC-Q

 

Wow, there are so many ingenious tricks involving images. I'll have to check out this video, hopefully I can find some code samples?