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

[Matt Williams]

On 3 November 2010 20:11, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> 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?

There's no guideline but the rule that I would work by is 0.1 seconds
is about as long as any animations should take. Any longer than that
and it just seems sluggish as you say. This is of course a rule of
thumb but I think it's a sensible place to start from.

I remember your original email on this exact subject a year or two ago
and your thinking then was that people make the animations slow so
that they can 'show off' the coolness of animation and so the player
really notices it. I think I agree and unfortunately people don't
realise that it has the opposite effect you mentioned above.

I would suggest to the maintainers of the games mentioned that you try
a duration of about 100 msec and see how it feels, it will probably
make it feel a lot more responsive.

Matt