Please remove the ingame animation fps cap from units

Please remove the limit cap of 30 fps from the animations! Give an option to more than 60fps animations in the game and in the World Editor! Thanks!

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I am guessing the 30 FPS cap on animations is a bug. Since there never used to be such a cap as far as I am aware.

World Editor and the game itself should be using the same graphic code. If World Editor is running animations at higher frame rates then the game itself should also be able to do so. If it is not doing this then possibly there is some bug. This bug could even be related to the poor performance a lot of players are experiencing, such as the result of thread synchronization timing issues.

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For a long time i coudn’t figure out why the game looked like it lagged at 60 fps, but if the animations are capped at 30 fps that explains it

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i just checked in reforged and in wc3 classic.

the editor runs smooth animations, the game doesnt. its the same for both reforged beta and wc3 classic.

i dont know why it is that way, but its kinda annoying now that i have seen and confirmed it. it probably has something to do with the editor not running a synced timeline (e.g. gametime in the editor doesnt exist). the game does, however. maybe it has something to do with the “game speed” - maybe the game drops animation frames in the “fast” game speed to quicken it, because it may be all based on the “normal” game speed. i’d need to do some deeper research. im no wc3 map creator, nor do i know anything about the w3 engine in particular.

the animation framerate probably is tied to the internal game timer, soooo, just making it 60 or 120 fps probably isnt some easy number change. therefore i think making the animations run at a higher fps will probably break something or everything in the game.

it would be worth fixing tho, because smooth animations look so much better and i dont know why blizzard hasnt done this. either they dont care enough to change it, or its so deeply rooted in the game engine that it cant be changed without effectively rewriting the whole engine. dunno, maybe someone with experience regarding that engine can do a better guess.

either way, i think we will be stuck with the supposedly “30 fps” animations.

Can you check with 1.31 release. Since the classic graphics in 1.32 beta will be using the same graphic code.

Also check if the animation rate is tied with game speed. Such as slow to fast. If not then there must be some other reason it is limited.

Maybe perform some high speed 60 FPS+ video recording to check if other aspects of the graphics change between frames. It could be a swap chain bug pushing out the same image to display twice. If running in windowed mode (default) then it could be a desktop window management bug.

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umm, lemme see if i can dig up an older version of wc3. i may have some 1.27 flying around on a hard drive. im a lil busy right now. we’re renovating the house. but ill try to look into it in the weekend.

the game fps looked and felt like real 140fps / hz (adaptive sync), not interpolated. reforged with classic assets was especially smooth, but even there the animations looked stuttery. from my initial impression id say the game doesnt interpolate general frame output, its really the animation playback only. maybe its also the effects / sprites.

im also working on a paintover / sketch for an improved UI for reforged, which i wanna release here pretty soon.

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I agreed with the topic for the removing the 30 frames limit from the animations! Having more frames as they say in the world editor would be ideal

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i checked version 1.20 (needed the CD to start the editor lol, good old vibes).

its the same with this version of the game. fluid animations in the editor, but low fps animations in the game.

this is wc3 classic, as reforged cant change game speed on the fly.

i recorded this scene in the editor, ingame at gamespeed “fast” and “slow” and sped up “slow” in post to 160% to match the “fast” speed. i might be a lil bit off here since 160% seem odd, but 150% looked too slow and reports about “fast is 2x slow” made it go way too fast.

judge for yourself.

in my eyes “fast” clearly is the worst, as animations look kinda rough and stuttery. compared to editor they even seem to miss animation keys. watch the statue, it jumps at one point, whereas in the editor its a very smooth up & down motion.
now the sped up “slow” footage looks kinda better than “fast”, but its still the same borked animation playback, as the statue still jumps and has no smooth motion.

my conclusion is:

editor has waaaaay superior animation playback to ingame and should be 1:1 source material. something happens in wc3 that screws over the animations - looks almost like a compression of some sort, or thrown out or ignored animation keyframes or a timing screw up or something.
it seems like “fast” is somewhat interpolated, as the “slow” footage looks a lil bit smoother, but its still borked.

bottom line: animation playback in wc3 is generally fooked. can it be upgraded to editor like performance? maybe i guess?

the difference in playback quality is kinda staggering tho. in my eyes this is one major point to tackle with reforged. its a waste to throw the new models (and the old actually) at this animation system.

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The frames have to be limited, in order to be compatible with Classic.

Classic backwardsness is hat will inevitably kill Reforged, in more ways than one.

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there is no “classic” - reforged will replace classic - classic will be reforged with classic assets. its the same engine. the old animations are getting borked as well as the new ones. and it has been like this probably forever. i checked version 1.20 and its the same. it has been an issue for almost two decades now.

the question rather is: why does the editor play the animations nicely for every game version, and the game doesnt.

why would you truncate your nicely done animations? i could just come up with performance reasons. and thats clearly not an issue anymore.

we also know now that the animations probably are getting screwed before being attached to the game time/speed or rather changing the game speed does not bring up editor like quality, which could have been the case.

looking at it like that, i’d guess you could make it work for both classic and reforged. but it might break alot in the process - maybe not. who knows.

can some dev give us some infos here?

Great research

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Still has to be compatible, Classic will not get an engine upgrade.

They should bump classic then.

No, they just want you to purchase the high-rezz skin pack, known as Reforged.

Reforged is just a way to get microtransaction into War3.

Oh yeah and Blizzard forces you to buy Skins etc…

no, thats not correct. the classic client already got an engine update. but thats irrelevant as everything thats currently wc3 classic will be migrated into the reforged client with classic graphics. the old wc3 will be gone entirely. there will only be one game version, and thats reforged. buying reforged gives you the slider to enable reforged graphics, the game, however, will be the same.

that aside, the animation problems already existed way back in classic… so either way you’d hope they’d fix that issue. it would have been worth for classic alone, but with reforged in mind that fix is kinda mandatory. and if reforged gets fixed, the “classic reforged” will be fixed aswell.

they kept the framecount and timings from the old animations for the new, that means they are drop in replacements. fixing that animation bug will probably work on both if it works for one.

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Source please?

common sense. theres only one starcraft version, too.

why would you have wc3 classic on a different bnet service, wc3 reforged with classic assets and wc3 reforged with new assets? and everything they change on reforged needs to be backported to classic wc3? no way they gonna fork wc3 like that with reforged - they want everyone on the same platform.

if they wanted to do it that way, they wouldnt make “classic mode” in reforged.

with the release of reforged wc3 classics bnet service will be shut down as wc3 classic will be patched /converted into wc3 reforged using the new battle net service with launcher integration etc. that also means all classic accounts will be wiped, except for they manage to establish a possibilty to link one wc3 classic account to your bnet account to retain unlocked icons.

with the release of reforged the classic client will be gone, therefore they dont need to hold “compatibility” with wc3 classic - just compatibility with the classic assets.

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Ugh. Why is it so hard to replace a (probably) integer-based frame count timing system (to determine when attacks hit, etc.) with a percentage-based one (percentage of animation length)? Convert the values. Done. Then you can uncap the animation FPS and enjoy smooth animations that don’t make the game feel like it performs like crap.

Do I have the right idea? Or is this more complicated? sigh