Animation optimisation

[TomatoFantasyStudio]

Hi evetyone!
We make a game and at the moment we have 45 animations and 3 characters, each animation has 60 frames and lasts one second. Downloaded in gif format.
After addition of animations in Game Maker 2, IDE began to noticeably slow down and for a long time to be loaded. I have 4 GB of RAM and it is fully loaded. Although the total weight of animations is about 150 Mb.

We are doing something wrong?
In which format is it better to load animations for optimization?

 

[RangerX]

Good LORD. 60 fps animation is complete overkill. There is your problem.
Can't you design better keyframes and reduce your animations by at least 30 frames each? Am sure this is doable with 99,9% of people of this Earth not noticing.

 

[Silver_Mantis]

Well that is 8,100 frames if I'm doing the math correctly. That is REALLY a lot of animations considering animation is normally done with less than 24 frames.
You should probably aim lower for your animation count, that's my opinion.

 

[TomatoFantasyStudio]

Okay, thanks a lot guys. We will reduce the number of frames.

 

[TheouAegis]

The total size of the gifs is 150 MB or the total size of the sprite resources? Sprite resources have a lot more weight than GIFs.

 

[JackTurbo]

As others have suggested, cut your animations down. A good place to start would 15fps, this is plenty for 2D animation. This alone will cut down the memory footprint of your graphical assets by 75%.

For some context, most traditional animation is made 24 on 2's (24fps but each frame is shown twice) so effectively 12fps. If it was good enough for Disney, I'm sure it'll be fine for your game.

 

[TomatoFantasyStudio]

Guys, thanks!

The total size of the gifs is 150 MB or the total size of the sprite resources? Sprite resources have a lot more weight than GIFs.

Only GIFs)

For some context, most traditional animation is made 24 on 2's (24fps but each frame is shown twice) so effectively 12fps. If it was good enough for Disney, I'm sure it'll be fine for your game.

That is, we should make the animation 12 fps. But what did mean under "animation is made 24 on 2's (24fps but each frame is shown twice"? Do we have to make 2 identical frames for every frame of the animation in GIF? Or anything else?

 

[Bingdom]

That is, we should make the animation 12 fps. But what did mean under "animation is made 24 on 2's (24fps but each frame is shown twice"? Do we have to make 2 identical frames for every frame of the animation in GIF? Or anything else?

Here's a good video

 

[JackTurbo]

That is, we should make the animation 12 fps. But what did mean under "animation is made 24 on 2's (24fps but each frame is shown twice"? Do we have to make 2 identical frames for every frame of the animation in GIF? Or anything else?

24 on twos is just an animation term that refers to 24fps and each cell being shown twice (resulting in effectively 12fps). The reason this became standard was mostly because 24fps was the standard in film, but was too laborious to animate at.

With 60 fps being the general standard in video games, I would suggest that 15fps makes more sense to work to than 12.

 

[RichHopefulComposer]

As others have suggested, cut your animations down. A good place to start would 15fps, this is plenty for 2D animation. This alone will cut down the memory footprint of your graphical assets by 75%.

For some context, most traditional animation is made 24 on 2's (24fps but each frame is shown twice) so effectively 12fps. If it was good enough for Disney, I'm sure it'll be fine for your game.

Pretty sure Disney animated on ones as a rule, actually.

Most animations will use twos for the bulk of the time though, and use ones for fast actions, where you need more fps to show the motion.

Either way, your point still stands. There's a lot of amazing stuff out there animated at twelve frames per second. Good keyframes are way more important than fluidity. I actually think a lot of Disney animation looks mushy and lacks impact because they constantly animated at 24fps for things that didn't need it. I watched Aladdin again recently, and was surprised at how bad some of it looked. Aladdin's facial expressions looked like they were going to jitter off his face half the time. Trying to cram too much "action" where it wasn't needed or realistic.

As a side note, I usually animate at (or around...I always end up tweaking animation speeds ingame) 12fps for my game. Started doing some 24+fps stuff recently though, haha. (Explosions and stuff - fast actions that need more fps to be legible, like I said. =D )

Edit: I don't understand why you think 15fps is better for games than 12fps, though...they both divide evenly into 60, and even if they didn't, you'd just be 1/60th of a second off once in awhile anyway, right? It's late....am I missing something?

 

[innercitysumo]

If you need ultra-smooth animation you would probably be better off with skeletal animation than producing huge sprite sheets. You can use things like Spine (http://esotericsoftware.com/spine-demos) with GameMaker.

 

[Andrey]

I agree with innercitysumo.
But I will notice that many characters with skeletal animation and a lot of key cadres + mesh also cause brakes. Especially on mobile devices.

 

[TomatoFantasyStudio]

Thank you! Your answers helped our project!