Making animation speed FPS-independent

Hi. I’ve been working on a project the past couple of weeks that is pretty much an on-the-rail walkthrough of an area, with multiple characters. The scene includes lighting, sound, and animations.

The characters were created and edited using external 3D software, using animations with skeletons that were imported as well.

The movement of the characters and the player’s perspective are handled using respective animation sequences, with the ques being handled as a cinematic for both animation and sound.

As of now, normal speed in the viewport on my system when simulated is 16.67 ms at 60 FPS. 16.67 appears to be the speed that the animations play at normal speed.

However, setting a different FPS cap on the scene will make the animation play much more slowly, with the ms value being changed from 16.67. FPS drops seem to reduce the scene’s speed by about half (not exactly half, since there is a sound discrepancy when I override the scene with t.overridefps 30).

If I got 60 consistently, this would be a non-issue. However, when working on lower-end computers, and when testing the final product in VR (my main intention), the speed of the player’s movement, the animations of the characters, the various particle systems in the scene, etc. are all slowed down.

I’m looking for some solutions. I heard that “get delta seconds” can be a node used to solve this issue so that FPS doesn’t affect controller input or manual player movement, essentially making FPS and timing independent, but I haven’t been able to find references that show how I can implement this. What can I do that will apply this to a scene with a lot of animations such as this one? Thanks in advance.

Well the first thing you want to do is cook off a project and run a profile on a stand-alone version. Based on the data you will be able to focus on just what is causing the loss of performance.

In general animation is animation so should not have much impact as to performance

On the other hand

1 light set to dynamic if you have 100 copies of the same light.
.
This kind of stuff can be hard to find but can’t hide from the profiler :wink:

Long way to say that until you run a profile it’s all just guess work

At this moment we’re content with performance loss due to the fact that the computers that will be running this scene are gonna be anywhere from average laptops to large gaming rigs. I’m aware of some dynamic lights in the scene, although disabling them isn’t enough to curtail the frame drops of VR.

My main priority at the moment is getting the scene to remain at a consistent normal speed of the original animations.

Here’s a fix if anyone else has a similar issue. Setting the project settings to this seemed to fix the problem and maintained a stable playback rate for the whole scene.