Character beeing animated at 24/30 FPS is just meh...

[squidski_]

I don't know if it's because I've been gaming at 60 FPS forever and maybe my eyes are just used to 60 FPS but the character animation being locled at 30 FPS is just plain wrong and makes the game difficult for me. I know the reason is to make it more "anime" but I think this reason is complete ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, just like most peasant console dev keep vomiting the same 30 FPS cinematic crap every now and then.

I wish characters were actually animated at 60 FPS. I don't think it's a bad game at all, it's still totally playable and this is hell of a fun game. I'll be playing this game for a while I think but it would be so much better if everything was 60 FPS. Again this does not mean it's a bad game, I'm just having a really hard time adjusting my eyes with the low fps, it look weird as ♥♥♥♥.

[Don Bone]

On that note, yes I do agree that if they could afford it, some special animations could be better (cinematic supers, IK animations, which don't interfere with gameplay). Not necessarily animated at 24 frames, but just enough to make it more energetic & intense than on the usual 6-ish keyframes on other motions (as per the usage of 'sakuga' in anime).

The other thing that could be better is, the story mode scenes could use more work (aside from the action oriented ones). As it is, it's using a lot of stock animations & most of the scenes aren't animated with as much care as the gameplay. But hey, this is the proof of budget limitations & if there's one thing they should cut costs & time on in order to improve on other more important animations (read: gameplay) then the story mode should be it.

[daflame]

The only part on the animation that bothers me every single time is the low frame animation for Millia and Johnny's intro. It's way more noticeable with Johnny. The first time I saw it I thought my PC was lagging but was surprised when the FPS indicator never dropped.

[Pride and Prejudice]

Originally posted by squiddlydoo:

Absolutly not, you have no idea what you're talking about. This isn't some frame by frame drawing. The characters are standard 3D models, just like any characters in SFV and giving them 60 FPS isn't harder then 30 FPS. It's just a dumb artisitc choice which I don't agree with.

So you haven't watched the video, where they actually explain, that they do frame-by-frame adjustment? The artistic choice has gameplay relevance as well. There are literally attacks and animations, that don't take longer than 20frames. Theses animations are cut up into important keyframes. Keyframes are hold longer to give a better understanding of which attack is happening. Additionally GG uses lots of Hitstop. Hitstop literally stops the game for a small amount of frames to give a stronger feel of impact and give the players a better way to recognize animations via their keyframes.

The artstyle increases recognizability, readability and a unique, outstanding look.

[Penguinator]

Originally posted by daflame:

The only part on the animation that bothers me every single time is the low frame animation for Millia and Johnny's intro. It's way more noticeable with Johnny. The first time I saw it I thought my PC was lagging but was surprised when the FPS indicator never dropped.

Johnny intro is probably the worst, I don't think anyone can argue for how it looks in motion. If a traditional anime would have a scene like that, they would never do it with so little keyframes (especially since the thing could be executed relatively easily with a repeating walk cycle), not to mention the camera being limited to the same low framerate despite actual anime doing backgrounds and general zooming/panning on every frame.

[Don Bone]

That's one aspect of it I wouldn't argue against, yeah. The problem with Millia & Johnny's intro (and some other cutscenes sharing similar problems) is that the characters and/or parts of them move a lot (e.g. moving from point A to point B to point C and so on), added with the camera actually moving a lot. In any production environment whether it's traditional 2D, vector 2D or 3D, the norm is to have more keyframes the more an object moves within a timeframe. I take it the planning (or lack thereof) mistake is the crew was allocating the same/similar amount of keyframes as in other cutscenes where characters are moving much less.

Which I take is probably one of the problems of having a 'very controlled' animating process such as this where some scenes are budgeted less than the rest when they should have need more, and the crew can only do so much to not make it look bad.

Animation in general also shares this problem, especially on the anime side of things. Certain scenes where budget is cut short and/or tasked with less-skilled animators would have obvious evident flaws in them. This is not saying the same problem within Xrd should be ignored ofc, just saying it's one of the common problems in production.

It's not so bad that it deters us from enjoying it, though it'd be great to see these problems smoothed out (especially with the usage of 3D models which should aid in ironing out the problem). Either in X4, or even as early as in the next expansion.

[KeathalKrisom]

Some of the fights in story mode look very choppy.

However I'd much rather them stick to imitating the sprite artstyle of older GG games for actual combat and maybe be a bit more loose when it comes to certain cutscenes.
Even to this day I sometimes have to remind myself that I'm looking at a 3D model, which is pretty amazing.

[Red]

Originally posted by KeathalKrisom:

Some of the fights in story mode look very choppy.

However I'd much rather them stick to imitating the sprite artstyle of older GG games for actual combat and maybe be a bit more loose when it comes to certain cutscenes.
Even to this day I sometimes have to remind myself that I'm looking at a 3D model, which is pretty amazing.

THIS. Plus they wanted to go for an anime look for the 3D-looking parts, why wouldn't they want to animate them at an anime-ish framerate as well, especially the most important events?

[StringKiller]

Originally posted by squiddlydoo:

Originally posted by StringKiller:

With the animation technique they are using making 60fps animations a la street fighter III would consume way more time and money than they can afford.

Absolutly not, you have no idea what you're talking about. This isn't some frame by frame drawing. The characters are standard 3D models, just like any characters in SFV and giving them 60 FPS isn't harder then 30 FPS. It's just a dumb artisitc choice which I don't agree with.

I regret to tell you that I know that what I'm talking about. In Guilty Gear models are animated frame by frame, as if it was a 2D animations (a lot of times because that is the desired effect, and other times because that's the only way to get that huge model deformations or poping in new models such as millia's hair do). Also the skeletons that are being animated have over 2k bones and if you really know anything about posing an skeleton that big frame by frame, you should know that these models take a really long time to animate and that's money.

I understand that interpolation could be used for a lot of the animations, but that not only it would make model-swapping animatiosn really wonky but the ASW team decided to recreate a purely anime like feel so the models actually seemed like sprites, therefor they actually had to use less frames to get the desired effect (you may not like it though).

The real problem is that if you choose both approaches (that is, animating fully frame by frame and also never using interpolation at all) adding more frames would be really damn time consuming, that's why I said that recreating the number of frames that SFIII has for example would be too costly for a game with this sales and with such a small team (it may seem like a big team, but for creating this kind of work is actually pretty small).

[Random Noises]

Well look on the bright side; at least you can identify attacks more easily when there are only so many key frames of animation to look out for. But if it's that big of a dealbreaker, you can just play something else.

[Sadorath]

I actually forgot about the low end animation speed in this game.. Picked it up again and almost puked from the gittery motion