Walk Cycle - Number of Frames?

[prototyp3]

What's the maximum number of frames allowed for a walk cycle?  Or perhaps the better question is how many frames before performance seriously declines?
Thanks.

[Archangel (aka SoupDragon)]

As far as I can tell the maximum is 20.

[prototyp3]

Thanks, Archangel.

Is there any downloadable games that use a high frame walk cycle like that? (especially with a larger character like 50x100, and screen res of 640x480)

I'm afraid I'll bog down performance with what I'd like to do; so I'm trying to get an idea of what's acceptable without completely killing performance.

And is there a document that lists the max number of frames for animated objects, backgrounds, and the like?  Thanks again in advance.

[Archangel (aka SoupDragon)]

Well, if we take a 50x100 character with 16-bit colour, then each frame will occupy 80 000 bits of video memory, or 10 000 bytes. Multiply that by 80 (four 20 frame cycles) and you get 800k memory used; times 2 for double buffering and then you get 1.6MB, which shouldn't slow most systems down at all. Of course, there are loads of other factors to consider but I don't think a 20 frame character is going to be the most resource hungry of things.

[scotch]

I don't think the number of frames will slow it down a lot.. just incease the filesize a bit.  The maximum number of frames I've ever used is 9 and that's pretty smooth, it's probably extra work for little gain to do 20.

[prototyp3]

Thanks again.  Quite a helpful (and quick!) group of people.
I'll definitely be tapping into the wealth of knowledge here as I move on.  

And just as an introduction, I'm Shawn, an artist at Activision who grew up on the Quest for Glory and King's Quest series.

[scotch]

'And is there a document that lists the max number of frames for animated objects, backgrounds, and the like? Thanks again in advance.'

Almost everything can be found in the help file.  All the animations for objects and characters are done with views the same as walk cycles, the maximum number of frames in one sequence of a view is 20, but if it's a long animation you can make the sequences merge together to form one long animation.

Maximum frames for an animated background is 5, but they are not realy recommended unless you actually have to animate a whole scene, better to use animated objects usually which can have hundreds of frames.