A Comparative Study of Skeletal and Keyframe Animations in a Multiplayer Online Game

As the game development process is a very tedious one, a good knowledge of which game animation technique that work best in practice is very essential. In this paper we study the performance of two popular animation models - the skeletal and key frame animation models. We have done some experiments using a test bed program to measure the performance, memory usage and hard disk space used by the two animation models. Our experiment results suggest that the skeletal model has major advantages over the key frame model, both in terms of the FPS (frame per second) and the memory load. We conclude that the skeleton or bone based animation models are more suitable for multiplayer online role playing games (MORPG), where the bandwidth usage is very intensive.