🧙 Mage Recolor & Animation Overhaul

This update is one of the biggest visual and animation passes MG2K has had so far. The mage has been rebuilt around a new shader-driven recolor system, letting players choose from 9 different character colors while keeping one unified player scene under the hood.

Even better, all mage animations have been replaced with new high-resolution, 60 FPS sprite animations.

🎨 Play as 9 Different Mage Colors

Players can now choose from:

• 🟤 Brown
• 🟣 Purple
• 🟡 Yellow
• 🔵 Blue
• 🟢 Green
• ⚪ Grey
• 🟠 Orange
• 🌸 Pink
• 🟦 Teal

Instead of maintaining separate baked player scenes for every mage color, MG2K now uses a single canonical mage scene with shader-based palette recoloring. This makes the system cleaner, easier to expand, and much better for future character customization.

🎞️ New High-Resolution 60 FPS Mage Animations

A huge batch of new mage sprite sheets has been added, covering a wide range of player actions and emotes.

This includes updated animations for movement, combat, spellcasting, reactions, and several new expressive character actions. The mage should now feel much smoother, more readable, and more alive in motion.

💬 New Emotes & Slash Commands

Players can now trigger several emotes through slash commands, including:

• ✅ /yes
• ❌ /no
• 👋 /greet
• 🏆 /victory
• 🧘 /meditate
• 💃 Dance commands

These are part of the new mage action animation system and help add more personality to player interactions.

⚡ Animation Performance Improvements

Because the new animation library is much larger, the game now lazy-loads many mage action animations.

Common animations are preloaded, while less common actions stream in the first time they are used. This helps reduce upfront runtime cost while still allowing the mage to have a much larger animation set.

🧪 Lobby Color Selection Improvements

The lobby color selection UI has been updated with animated preview cards, making it easier to see what your selected mage color will look like before entering the game.

Color selection also now submits properly through the lobby networking flow.

🏰 Interior & Server Performance Fixes

Interior zones now instantiate on demand instead of all loading upfront. This should reduce unnecessary load when entering maps with multiple interiors.

Dedicated servers also now skip visual-only fluid, fog, and smoke simulation, reducing wasted work on server builds.

👹 Networking & Monster Smoothness

Monster interpolation and animation prediction have been improved to reduce jitter, flicker, and “moonwalking” behavior on clients.

This should make enemy movement feel smoother and more stable during online play.

🧹 Other Fixes & Cleanup

This update also includes a large amount of scene, import, and asset cleanup after the mage asset path changes. Several references were updated across items, NPCs, tilesets, drop tables, UI, corpses, reticles, and castle content.

📦 Behind the Scenes

This update touched a lot of files, mostly due to the new sprite animation work:

• 📁 5,474 files changed
• ➕ 182,401 insertions
• ➖ 117,400 deletions
• 🆕 3,277 files added
• 🗑️ 2,101 files deleted
• 🖼️ 5,343 changed files under SPRITES

Most of that churn comes from replacing old mage sprite sets with the new high-resolution 60 FPS animation library.

✅ Summary

The short version: MG2K now has a much better mage foundation.

Players can now choose between 9 mage colors, the character animations have been rebuilt at high resolution and 60 FPS, emotes are starting to come online, and several systems were cleaned up to make future customization and animation work much easier.