Charles wrote:

First off, you never have an animation frame for every actual rendered frame in 2D animation. Almost everyone does it at a half rate or lower. I think the only animation I know of that uses a full natural framerate is Disney cartoons, which use a full 24FPS compared to standard animation (which I believe is 12). I seriously doubt SF3 used 30FPS for their sprites.

shift6 wrote:

All of his math also makes other assumptions, such as that a complete, full-size sprite is redrawn for any given frame of animation. Sitting here elbow deep in a carton of cheesy gold fish, I thought to myself: wouldn't the trunk and head of the character be fairly static (mod rotation and translation)? and if so, why not just keep a couple of body sprites and redraw legs and arms into the video buffer most of the time? Shit even Primal Rage with it's insane amount of 2D animation had fairly static main bodies from what I remember.

BaconTastesGood wrote:

My first thought is that you'd use, say, 15fps animation and then lerp between them using some type of image warp (paper mario style).

Reldan wrote:

If we're talking what passes for animation in a 2d sprite-based fighting game, then yes, 12 uniquely drawn sprites would easily look fine to cover a second's worth of animation. We're not talking a Pixar production here (although Pixar as well only renders 12 unique frames in a given second and people think it looks marvelous).

Reldan, again wrote:

The most visually impressive 2d sprite fighting game I've seen is probably Guilty Gear XX Slash. The animation has always looked very fluid to me. Does anybody have a rough idea on average how many unique sprites they use to pull off animating a character in this game?