Animations - How many frames?

Tris

Before I delve into making some complex, 60 frame animation - how does GameSalad go performance wise with animations?

For the case I'm doing - I only have one animation on screen at once. But at the moment it's 500x300. I actually want to do some stickmen fighting scenes depending on what the user chooses. (Woohoo!)

I just have a gut feeling I'm asking too much. Thoughts?

Edit: This is for iPad

gyroscope

Hi Tris, in another game-making app I used, I stuck to between 12 to 15 frames per second, and they looked just fine (games running on a Mac); I've also used animations as low as 7 or 8 fps for certain moving graphics, and that also was more than acceptable. There's an article that confirms that 15 fps is good compromise here:

http://www.brickfilms.com/index.php?action=tutorials&op=view&tutorialname=Frames Per Second

This is talking about filming rather than animation, but I think it still applies. For certain, the 60 fps you mentioned is way too many; you'd be wasting your time, as the human eye wouldn't distinguish that from a much lower fps.

I'm guessing that your stickmen animation, 500 x 300, is a cutscene for an iPad game? I'd hazard a guess that'll be no prob at all, providing it's at a fair frame rate, 15fps, for instance.

Hope that helps.

:-)

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Spiral Gyro Games

jstrahan

I've got one that's 276x177 with over 100 frames playing at 7 fps which makes it a little long to watch but it explains the game and the only thing on screen at that time I'll be testing it on the phone tonight

QuinnZoneStudios

I would try to stick between 15fps and 30 fps if possible. You might want to try a quick test for both but I recommend testing on actual devices. The larger the size the more likely you'll have to reduce frame rate.
Good luck and I look forward to seeing it!

gyroscope

Tris said:
Before I delve into making some complex, 60 frame animation - ...

Whoops, 60 frames, not 60 fps; sorry, misundertood! You can have as many frames as you like before you want it to loop i.e 60 frames at 20 frames per sec would give you pretty good quality animation over 3 secs, of course. you'll just have to watch out for increased file size, the more you have, as you know.

I guess it'll all be down to experimentation to see how the GS engine copes with a lot of these, but one anim. 60 frames at 20fps would be no problem for it, I'm certain. (Or even 4 secs before loop, at 15fsp).

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Spiral Gyro Games

Tris

Ah, excellent. Thanks for the replies.
Now to make some stick figure animations

I'll probably keep a fairly low frame rate - it is stick figures after all. My main concern was the amount of frames, which doesn't seem to be an issue so far.

AfterBurnett

Well I was planning on putting segments from my movie into a game so I'm hoping we can use LOTS of frames. LOL.

synthesis

I Doubt it...60 frames at a large size is a lot of imagery to load up into the rendering engine. It may be cumbersome to load and run for GS.

If you do it...I recommend using 8Bit compression...and don't use transparency. This will keep you image loads much lighter. I'd be interested to know how it all pans out for you. Post the results later on if you will.