I am making “yet another iOS” game with cocos2d and am now wondering what an acceptable number of frames per second for sprite animation would suffice?
This is more of a theoretical question as to how many animation frames I have to draw in order for the game to look good. For example: an animation specialist would love to draw 32 frames for a second of animation, whereas I think 4 frames is really enough. I do not wish to sacrifice RAM for something that no one might even notice. So what is the best number of frames to draw for a second of sprite animation? 4,6,8,12,16,20,24,32?
Update: If I create high-res graphics for the new iPad then then a single sprite animation of 24 Frames does not fit inside a Texture Atlas of 2048×2048 pixels 🙁 and I do not want to have a lot of these out of concers for RAM. Or am I thinking something very wrong here in the first place?
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So I would consider something higher than this to ensure your animation is perceived smoothly.
For reasons I’m not really sure of, I want to suggest multiples of these numbers, so I usually go for 24fps for character animations and often much less, down to perhaps 6fps for a fireball (for example)
However when it comes down to it, I haven’t really noticed a slowdown from running animations at higher speeds. You might do well to measure the time it takes to update at different frame rates.