game data and rendering mechanism

[User137]

How does TRenderer 'know' that Character[N] has a bitmap[N] for drawing?

The question is made slightly wrong. Character doesn't have any bitmaps, only different properties and states (such as "humanoid type 4 with blue helmet and white armor is jumping at animation phase 0.6, at coords X, Y"). How you define those is only limited by your imagination Only renderer class/unit needs to store the possible bitmap/texture/model data. Make good use of indexes sometimes. For example:

Renderer unit has:
model: array of T3DModel;

Game unit has:
TPlayer = class
  modelIndex: integer; // This would refer to model in renderer class
  animFrame, animDelta: single;
end;