[ux-app]

It's always a tradeoff between responsive movement and realistic movement. RDR2 has very realistic animations, with the tradeoff being slightly "floaty" controls.

Personally I prefer snappy movement i.e. when I press left the screen character moves left immediately. A more realistic looking animation system introduces a delay while you wait for the feet animation to "catch up" to player input.

[jordanthoms]

I guess the problem there is pretty fundamental - in reality you'd be tensing muscles and shifting your weight etc before the snappy movement, but the game only knows that you want to move when you move the stick or push a button - so it either has to show that realistic motion after your button press and introduce latency, or sacrifice the realism in the animations.

[lukeholder]

Correct, this is an issue in nba2k but it’s become a fundamental part of the game. As they made movements more realistic they introduced a delay. So when you try and get around you opponent you direct half a second before you move, but your defender also has to move their player - not in reaction to the screen but also in anticipation of your move in order to defend you. I actually think this is more like real life which makes the game better, but a lot less frantic than basketball arcade games of the past.

[mitthrowaway2]

This is also why 2D jump platformers like Megaman have triangular jump trajectories instead of parabolic trajectories. For snappy controls you leave the ground at the instant of the downpress and peak when you let go of the button. As the game can't know how high you intended to jump at the time the jump begins, the trajectory can't be parabolic. (At least, not on the way up.)

You could instead have the button downpress "charge up" energy and then begin the jump when the button press ends, which would allow for more realism, but also introduce a delay.

[ux-app]

>I guess the problem there is pretty fundamental

yes absolutely, you can't have both realism and snappy response times.

[viraptor]

There's a good workaround for this presented some time ago at GDC (although it was still simplified). In Overgrowth, if I remember correctly, your body core is responsive, even if your legs have to catch up. You lean, because you'll stay running in that direction. Which is actually closer to the realistic movement.

[thomastjeffery]

To elaborate on this, there is a third aspect being glossed over: the correctness of the animation itself.

They could alter the animation such that feet don't slide across the ground and keep responsive movement. The result would be a worse quality animation, because the movement of the legs would not appear to be pushing the rest of the body around. Instead, it would look more like the feet are following the rest of the body retroactively, while holding onto the ground.

A good example of this is Factorio's spidertron. When the spidertron moves, the legs follow with a walking motion that perfectly tracks the ground below. In this case, it's a great-looking tradeoff, probably because there are so many legs, and not much animation done to the body itself.

[fennecfoxy]

As mentioned in other comments, I think a big thing is the difference between the older way of doing it ie you have a character object that you move along a vector and the animation is supplementary to this to make it look like they're walking, vs animating the walk and then having the animation/movement of the character itself actually move the character through the world (which almost nobody seems to do).

[darzu]

I’ve always preferred the Wolfire approach[0]: animation should “do no harm” to player control, it’s only there to add flavor, never at the cost of game responsivity

[0] https://youtu.be/LNidsMesxSE?si=W7xnQfXt5ulfHklR

[ordinaryradical]

His proposition of a Hippocratic oath for animation is a beautiful and succinct way to frame a game design thesis. Great talk.

[larschdk]

I think there is also a difference between realistic and believable. The original Half-Life had IMHO more believable leg/feet movement. In HL, the feet were much more "stuck to the ground" compared to most modern games where they just slide around.

It appears much more believable to me than the character pathing demo, where the character moonwalks 1/2 the time. The entire pedal structure is extremely stiff compared to how humans move (feet, thigh and torso can all turn nearly 90 degrees, but they hardly turn at all in the demo). The other demos are better, but their bodies still appear stiff, like they are suffering from hernia.

[iamcreasy]

> Personally I prefer snappy movement

I do too, but also think it greatly depends on the game. For example, Hollow Knight designed to have snappy response to player input from the start and I loved it. In RDR2, I find the floaty behaviour adds another layer of realism.

[formerly_proven]

> It's always a tradeoff between responsive movement and realistic movement. RDR2 has very realistic animations, with the tradeoff being slightly "floaty" controls.

In GTA V characters have two different animation modes, the realistic one based on Euphoria when using the third-person camera and the "do what the darned keys are saying right now" when using first-person. Always seemed like a sensible compromise to me, though first-person movement is particularly snappy and direct, more so than pretty much any other FPS, which typically still have some inertia.

[fennecfoxy]

I don't see how that enables foot sliding unless it's a lazy solution tho? A no foot-sliding solution can be snappy, you just have to increase animation speed so the character is "ready" to execute the players input faster.

I think the real issue is the difference between moving the entire character as an object, with the walking animation being supplementary to that vs the walking animation being central to the character whose object moves because of the animation.

But for a game like this, arcadey instant direction change type movement doesn't really seem warranted either.

[henriquecm8]

If you look at npc locomotion, there's no foot slide, and for a character there is, but the character feet are out of screen most of the time when walking. I've played the whole game and never noticed this.