[Kde-games-devel] guidelines for animation speeds?

[Aaron J. Seigo]

hi all ...

every so often i update kdegames and try out some of the old and, when there 
are some, new games.

one thing that keeps cropping up over time is that the games often end up 
feeling sluggish after new development is done. and it's rarely, if ever, 
because the code has actually become slower. it's usually because the 
animation timings are chosen in such a way that animations between moves take 
a rather long time.

kdiamond was taking a quarter of a second to move items between spaces.
kfourinline is taking over a second to drop a piece to the bottom.
etc...

the result is that the player makes their move, then waits for the animation 
to finish, then moves, then watches the next animation, etc. the animation 
should not get in the way of taking the next move or prolong waiting to start 
taking your move, otherwise the game is not as "playable" by people over long 
periods of time: the playing-versus-waiting ratio becomes too high. for people 
who get good at the games, it's even worse: they spend less time thinking 
about moves and/or already know what to expect next, so the play-versus-wait 
ratio just goes up.

it also makes the affected games feel slow in general, with the resulting 
perception of "they don't perform very well" (which really isn't true at all, 
from my personal experience of tweaking the animation timeout values). it's 
such a small thing, but it has such a huge impact on the perceive fun value of 
the game.

so, my question:

is there is a guideline (or an "unwritten rule") in kdegames for how long it 
is acceptable for inter-move animations to take?

(btw, i'd like to commit a change to kfourinline's themes that reduces the 
speed of the falling animation to something slightly more exciting, adjusting 
the velocity from 0.3 to 0.8.)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks
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