Character animation glitch

Hello, I did a little animation test for practicing the Visionaire and there is a problem with the smoothness of walking animation of my character. I used 24 frames for each direction of movement and when playing the animation in the Visionaire Player, there is a massive flickering around foot area. Other parts of the body such as hands or head are nice and fluid, but the foots are very bad and it keeps me wondering WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG? I of course tried experimenting with the "Pauses [msec]" inside the "Walk animation properties" as well as with the "Walking speed" parameter. Nothing helped. Please check out youtube video I recorded (1080p), I hope you can see the problem clearly. Try cover the foot area in the screen with your hand on the monitor and you can see that overall animation is fluid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjBDvFjGvPU

yes, quite a few people have been reporting this issue (it's mentioned in a recent scale issue thread)

horizontal scaling doesn't work smoothly & for some people (me included) the character sort of goes blurry/vibrates/shakes somewhat when it is walking (all other animations & character animations work nice & smooth mind - everything plays as it should in the editor animation previews too)

I think the walk cycle system needs replacing (David would like to replace it at some point but currently he doesn't have time to work on it, as he's busy with other - more important - things on the to do list at the minute -hopefully, he will find some time to sort it out at some point as he has some good ideas for making it more realistic too )

But I'm not using the scale thing at all. It's something else wrong I guess.

Just watched the Stasis gameplay videos and its character animations are very smooth, so there has to be a way..

yeah, I said that the walk cycle thing you mentioned has been talked about in the recent scale issue thread.

David said something about it possibly being hardware related ...
could be your graphic card or not enough cpu/ram/vram etc that is causing the issue.

P.S: I phrased my last reply in a somewhat confusing way - sorry.

Okay, so I tried to increase frames and ended up on 85 frames with 0 msec for Pauses. And it's perfectly fluid now. I realized that the glitching a shaking thing is only for slow animations with high Pauses number and low number of frames. Actually that 85 frames is really really slow walk even with 0 msec for Pauses, so maybe I'll cut it down to 60 or so.

Anyway, I would like to ask: Could I somehow blend walk animation into the standing animation? I mean when guy stops walking there is frame-to-frame transition from "walking animation" to "standing animation". I would like add new animation of stopping, I mean some kind of interpolation from walking to standing. Is something like that possible? Maybe with "Start action after animation is finished" feature?

that was the whole idea behind David's idea for a new walk cycle system; to have it walk based on footstep contact with the floor/stop etc & not have the animation reset each time you click a new destination (more realistic) - Daedalic created their own custom walk cycle script for Chains of Satinav (they didn't fix the walk cycle reset bit though & I'm not sure exactly what the script did persay)

yes, you could use the animation finished feature to call one of the character animations ... I'm not sure if it would be called, if the character stopped mid-point? - I've not tried testing before. (with Lua, I think you could find the current active frame before it stops so that it could continue an animation (stopping) from the frame after (in theory) ... hmm.

creating more frames, means more Vram will be required - which will make your game run slower/take longer to load on older machines.

Keep an eye on the refresh rate that the game will be using. If the rate is 60fps and you use 85fps animations, the animation will be longer than the time it was supposed to be (1 frame 1 sprite, so with 85 sprites you will have 85 frames and 60 frames make in most scenarios a second, your monitor may use 85fps, then its fine just for your system). I also recommend using lesser sprites for that might be less of pain for the eye if you're not at full fps and the stuttering will be less visible.

so the best compromise would be to use a multiple of 10 (like 20 instead of 24/25/30) because most refreshrates are 60 or 100 hz "??"

@pyke do you have the same jittering in stasis? did you test it on a slower system? just wondering if/how you avoided it.

You can't really say that for every case, some might go best with 7, some with 13, other with 40fps (but only 15 images). It's a matter of taste.

yeah depends on how smooth you want the animation to look, you could even create an option that uses a character outfit with less animation frames based on graphic quality (low/medium/high etc)

daedalic, for instance used (approx) 26 frames in chains of satinav & around 6 in edna & harvey per walk cycle direction