Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Action latency
Now that we've created both approaches for animation handling, we'll take a look at the
pros and cons of each implementation. Direct control gives our agents absolute control over
animations and allows the decision logic to account for the cost of animation playback.
While it might seem counter-intuitive to mix animation logic with decision logic, this al-
lows a direct control agent to be in absolute control over the minimum amount of latency
required to go from a decision to a visible action within the sandbox.
With the indirect animation controller taking control over the body, the agent now faces a
new issue, which is action latency. Action latency is the time between when a command is
queued till it is acted upon. With our current setup of a fully connected ASM, this latency is
minimized as any command can go directly to any queued command. A fully connected
ASM is not a typical representation of an ASM, though. For many game types, this re-
sponsiveness won't affect the gameplay to a visible degree, but for other game genres, this
latency might become a constant source of problem between decision-making and anima-
tion playback.
Since there are a number of tradeoffs to both methods, which aspects are more important is
left to the implementer, responsiveness trading off animation quality or animation quality
and maintainability trading off with decision response.
