Currently im making a 2d rpg , and at the moment im adding the statistics of some items(in txt file(s))...everything's fine here.. The next step will be the most important(in my opinion) , which is .. the animation of every object in the world. How can i create a simple animation system ? What's the best way ? im using bitmap files(SDL libs) for every object if that matter;s...

I use DirectX, but my technique was derived from an SDL tutorial so it should work. You have 2 classes: Sprite and SpriteBase. SpriteBase is loaded from a text file, and one of these is created for each different Sprite Image. ie. You will have a text file for each Image file you want to load, and in the text file you will give the image name, and animation data. for each animation, i put a number of frames and each frame contains a Rectangle to use as a source from the image. The sprite class contains a reference to a spritebase. The sprite class contains sprite independant data ie. current animation etc. This way you can create 1000 sprites based on a single spritebase. Each update of the sprites will call currentanimation.update(); that will decide if the next frame is to be set depending on speed (set in the text file of a spritebase). I found this technique extremely effective in my C# Managed DirectX games.

good luck.

cool thanks for the information...i think i got it..

*Create a class with all the images
*Depends the action switch the current_animation int index
*update the main surface with the new image

But , how can i make it automatically? i mean if i just make a counter , you think that it will work?

*with counter , i mean something like this:
counter=0
while (game)
if counter <=100 counter+=1
if (counter>=100)
{
if current_anim <=max_index
{
change anime(in case we have a list .. just increase the index)
counter=0
} else {
current_anim=0
counter=0
}
}

might wanna make it time based. Using FPS to control animation is very odd, especially if your game can't run at a constant FPS on all computers.