Animation cancelling

[Q-T_3.14.exe]

Animation cancelling. What is animation cancelling?
Animation canceling is when in a video game your player character does an action and there is an animation for it. Here's the thing. To finish the action the animation has to finish. Depending on the animation it can take time. If you are in a hurry like a speedrunner then animationcancelling is for you.

Now to the main course of the topic, what do you think about this strategy? Is it unfair and takes the fun out of the game? Or is it useful and should be taken advantage of at any given moment?

Let's discuss about this animation cancelling ravioli.

[GhostyOsty]

I mean, you cannot really take it away if its a general error of the game system. It's sort of impossible unless if you create a new game engine.

Animation Cancelling saves time. Is nice. Especially when it occurs in RDR2 while I'm hunting. I really don't want to spend a whole 18 seconds skinning an animal, and maybe I can get an animation cut of 4 seconds.

[Pieshaman]

I do this in cyberpunk, switch weapons right after reloading and then switch back.
It gives faster reload than just press r for reload cause it not make the animation of the reload.
I not going to wait like 3 full seconds when a big choom with 2 handed hammer is hitting me from behind and some other choom got a heavy machine gun and then there is also a sniper, a ninja with katana and a netrunner that I not even seen yet all hitting on me.
my pistol only got 12 bullets and they need like 3 headshots to down so I sometimes really have to "cheat" skip reload animation or take punches in the face xd

[ʙᴜɴ.ᴇ]

in some multiplayer games its a form of cheating via exploiting.

[Hesti]

Originally posted by 💕 𝓑𝓾𝓷 💕:

in some multiplayer games its a form of cheating via exploiting.

I've genuinely never heard that. In which ones?

[gza]

I like the additional skill ceiling it can sometimes bring in.

[TGC> The Games Collector]

Kind of depends, I mean, is it by design or is it really using a glitch?

Block cancelling in action games for instance. It's usually by design, as it makes blocking more useful. But it can definitely be used for tricks.

I remember GunZ online being a bit more of a glitchfest on that aspect. You could do infinite wallrunning, speed reloads, etc.
Honestly kind of too bad it got ruined by hackers, because the glitchy combat was fun. It was a feature, not a bug. lol

[Kargor]

Cancelling can be important in some games.

Like, you might have a defensive move (evade, block) that you can do at any time, cancelling your attack. Or you might not, in which case you have to finish swinging your huge sword around...

Also, if a boss has a full heal ability, it might be useful to keep something available that can cancel the spell when he starts the casting. Or a rather damaging, large area attack where you might not be able to get out in time.

[Irene ❤]

It is fun once you master it. Developers usually close one eye about it because it's fun, so it's added value. Unfortunately the ugly players will abuse it. They will write programs and scripts so their repeating cancel can return with a monstrous advantage. When it happens developers will jump on their chair because their software is now highly abused. They will usually patch it and it will disappoint many with muscle memory, resulting a drop in player base.

[Tiberius]

It's needed to make the gameplay feels smoother and responsive. Forspoken and ff15 had this problem where your character is locked to full atk animation, it made the game feels janky.

[Devsman]

I dunno, I think the speedrun community has done a good job of divvying all this stuff up. You've got categories for skip glitches vs no skip glitches, 100% vs any%, tool assisted vs ... not-tool-assisted?, etc. Even down to stuff like does or doesn't take damage to save time.

If it ever came down to it, you could upload your speedrun with the note of NO ANIMATION CANCELING.

I've done some pseudo-speedruns before, but never competetively. There are a handful of games I've played through enough times to make your head spin, but even so my best attempts at speedrunning are not all that impressive. Though I manage to find criteria nobody really has uploads or records for, like Mega Man X1, 100%, non-TAS, no skip glitches, takes damage to save time, no stage exit button.

[Q-T_3.14.exe]

Originally posted by 💕 𝓑𝓾𝓷 💕:

in some multiplayer games its a form of cheating via exploiting.

In combat or just in general? I can understand combat.

[Schindler's Lifts]

In some games it can be a balance issue, but in most games I play, this has already been accounted for by making the cancelled animation take the same amount of time as if the animation played normally. So I don't really have any arguments to make regarding balance or fairness.

What does bother me (though admittedly more than it should) is when players animation cancel when using snipers. Specifically when they reload cancel the bolt action animation on bolt action snipers, or sometimes the pump action animation on shotguns. There a weird.... frustrating feeling to watching them constantly cancel the animation before it fully plays. CSGO AWP players and some TF2 sniper mains do this a lot, and it makes their gameplay really annoying to watch.

I am probably the only person in the world to be bothered by this, but it's a pet peeve that I've had for a while.

[Dadpool]

It's a skill like every other, I guess you can attempt to become as good at it as possible(especially in games like Devil May Cry), I had a fun doing it, it's not very easy to do for an average player(again, in DMC), it might feel kinda like cheating, so overdoing it might make the game boring.

[Devsman]

I abused animation canceling in Mega Man Legends 2 to farm money on the golden bird.

If you hold shoot and keep tapping up, the transition from run animation to stop animation resets the timer for the next shot, so you can shoot a ton faster. This effectively lets you shoot as if your energy stat were at max, and your rapid stat were potentially higher than max.

You really wouldn't blame me if you knew what I was trying to do. It look over 3 million Zenny to turn light after kicking that pig until I was certain I couldn't get any darker, and then another minute or so for good measure.

See, I wanted the stuff from the darkMM-only shop, but I wanted to finish light. And, well, I didn't plan it out especially well. It took something like twelve hours JUST farming that money.

[Computer]

In unity engine editor i am a noob and i don't know how to cancel the animations.

I have character perform action if(Input.GetAxis(horizontalAxis)) != 0)
// or if(Input.GetButton(Forward))
{
animator.SetParameter(AnimateWalk)
}

if(Input.GetButton(Jump))
{
animator.SetParameter(AnimateJump)
}
else if
{
animator.SetParameter(AnimateIdle)
}
}

the animation for walk jump & idle are all multiple frames, sometimes my animations are 5 seconds or longer even. When the animations are long there I have a delay between actions because i have no idea how to stop the animation mid action.