I'm working on a small solution to frame based animation and had a matter of debate with myself as to frame lengths. Is there any necessary reason to have individual frames contain a length of time? Implementing it would let some frames be longer than others, but I'm not sure of any logical reason to do so. Are there any instances where such functionality is nice to have? It wouldn't be hard to implement, but I'd rather not spend time on it unless I can think of a reason I might want it later.

I'm not sure how common it is these days, but the original Prince of Persia had wildly differing frame lengths IIRC.

I assume you are talking about animating the frames of your sprites?

You could get mostly the same effect by running the animation at a fixed rate and repeating frames. It would be trivial to implement that way, and would give mostly the same effect.

With a small enough time step, (1/60th of a second) the effect would be probably be indistinguishable anyway.

Skorche Wrote:I assume you are talking about animating the frames of your sprites?

You could get mostly the same effect by running the animation at a fixed rate and repeating frames. It would be trivial to implement that way, and would give mostly the same effect.

With a small enough time step, (1/60th of a second) the effect would be probably be indistinguishable anyway.

Er... I assumed that's what the frame duration was going to be used for, deciding how long/how many consecutive frames should the current frame be displayed.

I was assuming that he meant that each frame would also have a variable time value. What I am saying is that it would be easier, trivial in fact, to just use a fixed animation rate and repeat frames to make them longer.

I think you should give each frame a display time, something you can tweak to make even four frames look like motion.

Time is a good, use it wisely.

Try Photoshops/Image Ready's animation Palette, there should be a new beta open at the moment.

agreen, try Image Ready's animation Palette