Animations, are they worth it?

Would you sacrifice animations in favor of faster / bigger updates

  • Yes, I would sacrifice all animations if it means faster / bigger updates

    Votes: 46 37.7%

  • Occassionally some animations are still nice

    Votes: 41 33.6%

  • There should be as many animations as possible even if it means smaller / slower updates

    Votes: 35 28.7%
  • Total voters
    122
2

215303j

Guest
Guest
recreation posted something in the Bad Memories thread which I didn't fully realise up to now, namely how much time devs spend on animations.

recreation said:
To reduce time, as simple as it sounds, but that's the only reason. Creating fluid animations takes time, rendering them takes even more time. The animtaion preview in daz isn't really good, so most of the time you only see if the animation is good after it is rendered, and the chances that it sux is really high, so I tried to minimize the risk while also doing the best I can to make them look good and fluid.
I posted it before, but I actually wanted to include different camera angles for the animations, but it simply takes too much time, if I'd done that, I would still be a month or two away from a release.
To give you an example: Katherine has two animations for each gender, one animation has 60 frames = 60 render, only rendering one of these took 15 hours, but that's just the rendering, setting up the scene, posing each frame, corrections etc, take a lot of time as well.
Each of the Ellie animations has 360 frames, and they are way more complex (and still look simple), so we are talking about weeks here.
Click to expand...
For me personally, animations are in the "nice to have" category, and although I appreciate / understand it if devs want to put animations in their game, the time it takes is huge...
As I personally mainly play for the story, as supported by stills, I would much rather have the dev spend more time writing and rendering stills, then spending that much time on a still fairly short animation.

Yet I also read comments like "nice game, but no animations, so I'll pass". I guess it's different for everybody but I'd still like to hear some opinions.

IMPORTANT NOTE: I copied above text with permission from recreation to start a discussion and to create some awareness but it is NOT my intention to question his game design choices or his way of working. If you want to discuss that I'd suggest to send a PM or post in the game thread.
 
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Loqic

Loqic

Royal Jelly
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Oct 26, 2017
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More often than not I only find them annoying.
"Okay, that looks nice... still going huh... can we continue the story now?.... shit! wrong choice! It's starting the loop again" :cautious:
The worst offenders are games that come with a huge grind that makes you sit through the same animations every ingame day.
 
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Adabelitoo

Adabelitoo

Well-Known Member
Jun 24, 2018
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"No animations. I pass"

*insta facepalm reaction*

We live in the "I want everything and I want it now". People want a good story, good characters, character development, sex scenes, animations, voice acting, meaningful choices, multiple endings, etc, and they want a good amount of that in each update but it has to be in a monthly schedule because if you don't you're milking people.

Thankfully, that isn't the mentality of most supporters and those who help to make these games as long and good as they are. Honestly I feel that 95% of those I described above are just horny teenager going for the quick fap who doesn't realise that things take time or they just don't care about it because they just want the quick fap and Ctrl all over the game until they see the picture/animation they were looking for.

My vote is a 100% Yes, I would sacrifice all animations if it means faster / bigger updates if that's what the developer wants, if he wants to keep doing it then please go ahead, it's your game, have fun with it.
 
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ShootingStar

ShootingStar

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Jan 28, 2020
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Animations can enhance the game a lot, or make it way worse, depending on how well it's done, atleast for me, I remember seeing quite a few animations that looked very unnatural or weird, but for those games with great animation, they really made the experience and immersion way better.

So yeah, it's a double edge sword that shouldn't be a necessity.
 
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Hadley

Hadley

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Sep 18, 2017
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Depends on the Quality of the Animations. If the Animations are great then you can't have enough, but it always depends on the workflow and the renderbudget.

In short: I'd rather have no animations than bad ones.
 
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somebodynobody

Engaged Member
May 11, 2017
3,247
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Are they necessary? No.

Should they become a standard? Sure.

The question other than how well it is done/looks, is how to give the player the ability to get through it at their own pace. repeating a gif/video/animation where you can't speed it up, slow it down, bypass it, or leave it running if you so choose is annoying. A big place where this is bad is in a lot of rpgm games where you choose something and then it is waiting a minute to let the same repeating 8 frames finish.

Do I think it eats into development time of other things. Sort of.

If a dev has already planned out where the update will start/end and all of the things in between, then the animation time to make should be within that plan also. Thus no eating up time, seeing as if was either the animation or 8 stills and no other change to the game. Now if they don't plan and just do as much as they can in the time frame, then yes of course it will eat into time.
 
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TrialRagnarok

TrialRagnarok

Scrambled Bussy Appreciator
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Jan 22, 2018
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I already have a 2DCG bias over 3DCG to begin with, so most DAZ and similar software models are a turn-off for me with few exceptions here and there but I honestly think that for dev time, static images and one or two animation loops every now and then to "spice" things up a bit are good enough.
Especially since automatic animations tend to look awful most of the time and frame-by-frame ones, while they look great most of the time (depending how much time the devs put into those, of course), they certainly take up a fuckton of time and as one user mentioned, sometimes the software's preview isn't completely accurate so rendering (depending on detail, textures, bitmaps, shaders, etc.) eats up a lot of time and it's kinda frustrating cause it's dead time, especially if you leave the renders for last and can't focus on another things like the script.
 
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W

woody554

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Jan 20, 2018
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I'm not a huge fan of animation in VNs, I find especially high fps animation breaking the story flow a bit. it just feels too different from the stills you see before and after. the jerkier 5-7 fps animations often seem to sit into the story much better stylistically.

but it's not a big deal either way.

about the people who skip games because of them either way though, doubt there's more than like 3 of them. people say all kinds of stupid shit in the comments, and it often seems much more representative than it really is. like how there are people endlessly complaining about incest games yet it's easily the most popular category. we're here for the stories, and if it tickles our specific fetishes we're gonna be interested in it no matter what.
 
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