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.
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.
yes absolutely, you can't have both realism and snappy response times.
I think humans are worse than this than you might think. Give it a try! Walk around and try to change directions on the fly, maybe have a friend shout suggestions to you. I can make maybe 2 or 3 adjustments per second, which gives about 400ms response time. That's about where RDR2 sits, and players criticized it for being unresponsive.
A great tennis drill is when your coach hits the ball to you and randomly yells "LEFT!" "RIGHT!" or "MIDDLE!" after you've begun your swing. Then you have to hit the ball in that direction. Helps hone your reaction time and helps you to have a "neutral" swing that doesn't telegraph your intentions to an opponent.
One can imagine variations in many sports.
Watch a sprinting football player dodge. Their feet go in the opposite direction as they want to move the same way you move an inverted pendulum. If you want the top of an inverted pendulum to move left you move your hand to the right. It still looks very fast because you don’t see the initial ~200ms delay between deciding to doge and the point when their feet start to respond.
Most martial arts will teach their own type of footwork optimized for the style, but it’s common to use a shuffling motion which keeps people’s feet close to the ground. It allows for a more rapid change in direction but is slower and less effective than normal walking if you actually want to get somewhere. Fencing and Kendo want more mobility where wrestling and Judo wants more stability etc.
There you 'actively' walk and 'manually' keep balance. It's an interesting experience, but it makes walking a conscious act, it becomes something you do.
Arguably that is less realistic than just moving an analog stick, for most people walking is just telling your body to move in direction x.
An interesting personal anecdote I have:
I damaged my back with bulging disc, which caused horrific sciatica nerve pain.
When I was able to walk again, I had some nerve damage.
This meant I had lag in my left leg!
I’d tell the leg to move instinctively when walking and there would be a delay. The entire walking movement of the leg was present, but just with a noticeable lag!
It was weird!
Eventually it healed fully, or I adjusted. Not sure which! :-)
I had a couple of MRIs to see what was going on.
Essentially I’ve got degenerative disc disease.
My specialist was the head of the Spinal Care unit at the Royal Adelaide Hospital.
So I trusted his advice.
He said that surgery could very well make it worse, and that over time it would likely begin to heal itself.
I had a couple of steroid injections and took mild painkillers and anti inflammatories to manage the pain for a year or so.
The initial incident was well over five years ago.
Ive had reviews since, and the advice is still the same.
Surgery is a last resort. Just keep mobile and don’t do anything to make it worse.
The MRIs show that the disc that is jamming into my nerve has slowly begun to reduce.
So I force myself to remain mobile by continuing to walk everywhere, and have a standup desk for work as I literally couldn’t sit down for months!
I pretty much now never lift anything.
Your body cant process pain and motion at the same time. Which is a simplistic explanation. So walking is an excellent path to recovery.
Before the injury I’d back squat 130kilos, and strict press 95, could run a marathon and had a resting heart rate of 42bpm.
It flares up from time to time, and is never truely better.
I’m never pain free, I just learn to ignore the pain and keep moving!
I could talk for hours about my journey LOL
Your brain is hiding a lot from you.
Controllers use analog input for the sticks. I guess you could create a system which uses a dead zone where the player "signals" their intention by partially moving the stick in their desired direction.
This would be incredibly cumbersome though, and the payoff would not be worth it.
Like those arcade shooters where you duck and lean to dodge bullets, or a full fledged whole-body VR setup on an infinite omni-directional treadmill.
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.
I guess it's all trade offs at the end of the day, dev effort vs game style vs priorities.
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.
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.
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.
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.