I am creating a game where potentially 100 people could be in a world. This is going to be a 2D top-down game with all the basic controls you would expect in a 2D top-down game as well as gear swapping. The first thing I thought of was to just create sprite sheet animations but this would be inefficient, to say the least, as I would have to make 1000s of variations if not more.
Spine Unity Runtime seems like it could work with different skins for each item of gear. For example, the headpiece, chest, gloves, etc... You can create a skeleton for all the different views and animations and use different skins for each "slot". I am just worried about performance as it could run into spikes if I have 100 networked players all using a spine skeleton with all of the different skins and animations loaded.
Is this a good option or can someone tell me of different options to accomplish this?
Thanks in advance.