It depends on the style of your game. Even 2 FPS can be enough for an animation to look good.

Depends on the amount of RAM you need to squeeze the textures into.
- if a walk animation is 24 FPS and 2 seconds long, each frame is 32x64, 32 bit color..
= 48 frames, 8192 bytes (8 kB) per frame
== 384 kB.
So it looks acceptable now.
However, the memory requirements tend to increase very fast when this kind of animation is used.

P.S. As the games are usually running at 60 fps, you should keep the FPS of your animations to numbers like 10 / 15 / 20 / 30 -- if 60 is divided by any of them, you'll get a whole number and that means your animations won't suffer from artifacts if they're displayed when game has vertical synchronization enabled.

Quote:Original post by Wibbs
So a walk cycle at 24 fps for a reasonably detailed natural walk would be acceptable?

That would be more than acceptable, that's almost certainly overkill. For slow actions like walks even Disney films only usually run at 12fps, and for a game where the characters are much smaller on screen you could probably get away with half that again.

Animations often look smoother at fewer frames due to the artist's limitations (and in the case of pixel graphics, the resolution). If you're using flash/vector animation the frames are automatically generated anyway, manual framerate is only an issue for non-vector animation. Even then, there isn't really a need to have a standard framerate for the game, it's entirely possible to display each frame for whatever length of time looks best, or display the same frame for different times in different situations (for example a character with a 'haste' buff, you might want them to walk 10% faster, thus you have to speed up the walk animation framerate 10%).

Anyway a reasonably detailed natural walk is standardly animated using 8 or 10 frames for the cycle; I can't imagine a situation where you would want to use more than 16 (unless maybe if the character was going to be walking in super slow motion, but it's unlikely you'd want to do that...)

There are plenty of example walk animations around the internet, the ones that are available as animated gifs are particularly useful because you can see the number of frames in the image properties.

Example - This is a jog cycle I did, so it's a little different (and artistic nudity warning because this is supposed to be an mmo avatar base with clothing added later) but it's 14 frames - I could conceivably have added another pair or frames where the foot kicks forward to get 16. Thin Female Anime Avatar, Jog Cycle If you notice it looks a bit flickery, that's partly because it's not a finished polished animation, but partially because with so many frames it's very difficult to place the lines accurately enough to make the motions look smooth. On the other hand I've got 4-frame animations that look perfectly smooth.