I’m so on board for more Sakurai flexing whatever weird thing he can (minecraft pickaxe to sword, counting to 17 on his hands, clapping a specific number of frames, etc)
Let's not forget his most legendary feat: revealing HE was Master Hand and Crazy Hand by playing a 1v1 between his hands. (His left hand has had problems for years like it is crazy.)
that's because he's been developing games for years, ofc its different with u that doesn't have experiences of making games like him. so its unnecesary to compare
I do wonder though. It can easily be adjusted in post. When counting the frames just play back the video faster or slower to make it align a frame faster or slower. It does not need to be frame perfect to appear frame perfect in the video. But if it was done on first try like that for real, it's pretty impressive even for a game dev. But, fighting game devs are also the ones that are absolutely using frame counting the most. So if anyone can do it, it should be fighting game devs and fighting game pro players.
@@Girugi You can go frame by frame on UA-cam with comma and full stop (right of M key) As far as I can tell Sakurai's 30fps clap is about 29-30 frames long (starting with 1 on impact) on UA-cam
Sorry for being pedantic but "irl frames" isn't a thing, as Sakurai mentioned this works assuming you're recording at 60fps, so you're essentially counting seconds. I feel the need to mention it because way too often I see gamers genuinely asking what's the "real life" or "human eye" framerate and it doesn't really work like that.
@@Gabo2oo How did you reach the conclusion and then assert that there is nothing akin to a 'framerate' for real life or the human eye? The statement "it doesn't really work like that" is after all open to interpretation. The human eye kind of does have a framerate in that it can only process optical data at a certain speed, limited by how quickly the rods and cones' photosensitive chemicals can react with photons and then pass their signals electrochemically, with the human brain processing this optical data as an image in approximately 13 milliseconds, with each image being generated discretely and individually, and thus one could argue the human eye has a framerate in its own way. Similarly, there is a proposed theory in physics that time does not move continuously but in smaller quantum discrete simple units, proposed as chronons, with one or two studies lending evidence to the hypothesis that time is itself a product of quantum entanglement. I am not asserting that real life absolutely does work in a literal framerate because that would be silly, but there is credence to the notion that it could work "like that", which is the wording you used. Not to get pedantic.
Well, 60 frames could pass in one second if we are at 60 frames per second, in two seconds if we're at 30 frames per second, in half a second if we're at 120 fps, etc. It depends on the speed.
You mean one second? Just look at a clock m8 lol 30 and 15 frames were definitely more impressive. Who can do half a second or quarter of a second that well? Besides musicians?
meanwhile i had a short but interesting stint with animation many years ago and and with what i learned from that, i walked away from this not understanding what this video was getting at.😵 a lot of these videos are very insightful and then a small few have me scratching my head...
@@ArcRay20 The video is about instinctively feeling the timing and rhythm no matter the frame rate. To know exactly how much a half or quarter or an 8th of a second is and being able to notice when it's wrong.
I used the < and > keys to advance the video frame by frame. He was actually perfectly timed. It was real... Sakurai can clap in perfect frame counts. WTF When he did the quick clapping back to back here is the frame count of his claps. 30, 30, 31, 30, 30, 31. At first, I thought it was 31 a bunch instead of 30, but then I realized I counted the final frame that his hands touched twice. Once for the frame they touched, and once again after I wrote the number down. So I subtracted 1 from every number and came up with the 30, 30, 31, 30, 30, 31. Crazy! I feel like I had to have counted wrong, but I don't want to count it all over again lol. The weirdest thing is when he did the 15-frame clap I actually thought that was a little fast for 15 frames as well! I've played too much Smash XD
30 frames can be trivialized as just half a second, and 15 a quarter of a second. So if you can internalize how long a second is, it makes halves or quarters much easier to time, especially if you have experience keeping rhythm.
It also means he has 1/30 of a second, or 0.0333 seconds, of error margin. That doesn't seem like a lot but it's actually not that bad. But all this doesn't really matter since you're not counting frames as much as you are counting seconds. If this footage was shot on 240 frames per second then you would count 240 frames in the same amount of time, so really why not just say "this is 1 second" and get a constant out of it?
@@CaseyHofland You count the frames because when you are making a game, depending on what type it is, you may have certain things happening at certain frames. For example you may have the hitbox appear for a certain attack at frame 6 and that is how you input it in the game engine. Since you are often working with the frames it is better to understand it like that. If you understand it as seconds you would still have to convert it into frames when making the game or refer to it a 1/60th of a second which isn't as effective. Then if something makes the game run at half speed would you say that 1 second runs in 2 seconds or would you say that it runs at 30fps? At that point you are back to talking about it as frames again. So TLDR: A game is made in frames per second and runs in frames per second. Having a good understanding about the "flow" of frames is a specialized skill that can be an advantage when working on a game.
Counting frames like Sakurai does it is as straight forward as counting seconds, which is obviously gonna be more difficult for some people over others. One thing that managed to help me a lot is listening to songs that run at 120bpm! That's 120 "beats per minute", or in other words "Exactly two beats every second". My personal song of choice is Lemon Demon's "Dinosaurchestra Part 1", but some popular songs that run at 120bpm include: - Tik Tok - Ke$ha - Call Me Maybe - Carly Rae Jepsen - Dynamite - Taio Cruz - Wrecking Ball - Miley Cyrus ...Now, play 1:22 in the video again, while playing one of the above songs in your head 😛
"Happy Together" by the Turtles - the song used in Smash 64's commercial - is also 120 BPM. However its notes are in triplets, so it's better suited for counting 10- or 20-frame intervals than 15.
@@Kithara1117 Honestly, no, I only picked those songs because they were songs I personally recognized when I googled "Songs with 120bpm"... Though you'd still reasonably be able to glean my rough age-group using that selection nonetheless 😛
Sakurai-san showing off the power he has accumulated through the years for 3:48 seconds straight while delivering a very important and yet very entertaining lesson is nuts, thank you.
I think it's important to make a distinction between frame rendering times and game logic time increments (what may be referred to as "ticks") which should run separately. Tying game ticks to frame rendering times causes issues if rendering times vary like when lag occurs.
Yeah. Using rendered frames as the time base for physics and input is a very obsolete design. It worked in the 8/16 bit days when you had a fixed 60Hz refresh no matter what.
Aye, as an example Unity's Update method runs on every frame. A newbie mistake is to put "timer++" inside it. It will go up by 1 on every frame, meaning going from 30FPS to 60FPS doubles the speed. "timer + 1 * Time.deltaTime" will use the time in-between frames to smooth it out.
@@BenightedAlizar time delta's have some pretty big downsides though. When it comes to game physics, most games are better off having their physics update in fixed time increments over dividing by time deltas because it makes the engine behavior predictable and reproducible.
You made me search "sakurai binary". I didn't know there was such a way to count with the fingers, though if you know binary already it's pretty straighforward, since you're just keeping your finger straight to indicate 0, and fold it to indicate 1. Now, the frame perfect clapping... This is honestly amazing.
This whole channel is a master class, he breaks the fundamentals down so easily for new developers and old alike. Always interesting to see his work flow and how he correlates everyday things into ways it can be used at a high level development.
From a music sense, Sakurai is describing the 1 e A & method of beat subdivision. If you want to practice and hone this, I actually found a few years back, if you watch the melee intro vid, you can get a sense of this from watching the clips of fighters in conjunction with the music. for example, marios moves he performs before bowser comes on screen or even better, the clips before we see pre rendered Sheik. Those video clips-in conjunction with the music, if you count the beats of any new vid clip that comes on screen,is a decent example of sub divided notes- the notes in between. listen to the musical phrases and count how many clips of action happen between those phrasings before pre rendered Sheik appears. We can think of the musical phrasings as taking up 4 beats that repeats twice. the video clips offer a subdivision of those 4 beats. Reply if you want the precise time of the video clips from melees intro to try this little subdivision experiment. I post this because rhythym and subdivision is a important musical concept that not everyone can intuit.
Oh boy! Time for my musical experience to help! My frame of reference is a standard Sousa March, which is 120 BPM-in other words, every measure (2 beats) is one second. So each beat is half a second, or 30 frames (assuming our game is running at 60 FPS). Half a beat is 15 frames. Count a measure in triplets, and you have three 20-frame intervals. I tend to use deltaTime when programming in case performance dips, but the values themselves are determined by calculating frames in a 60-FPS gameplay environment. 1:36 Sakurai is literally teaching the musical concept of subdivision here lol.
@@Trimint123 Always have this same conversation with Smash players who want to broaden the definition of fighting game to something completely vague, just so Smash falls under the definition. It doesn't and it never will. Smash isn't a fighting game. A game where you "beat each other up" doesn't necessarily mean it's a fighting game. Streets of Rage isn't a fighting game, nor is Doom, nor is Elden Ring, nor is For Honor.
@@PsychoJosh this is why you need to learn how game design works. smh. It's not that complicated to see which one is a fighting game and which one is a beat 'em up Sure, fighting game were mostly 1v1. (Well with the exception of KOF and TTT, with their tag-team concept) Smash main gameplay is literally fighting game with health indicators and the variative number of players joining the fray, figuring stuff to get your opponents out of the ring. There's a REASON why Me lee is really that good for competitive match.
Something I learned from Music is how to subdivide the beats even further and make it easier to say out loud. Mr. Sakurai used 1-and-2-and, but you can take it even faster using 1-e-and-a-2-e-and-a. Of course, that's probably not necessary, but it may still come in handy some day.
In this context (60fps = 120bpm) it'd be handier to count triplets (1-and-a-2-and-a-3...) so each note is 10 frames; straight sixteenths (1-e-and-a-2-e-...) would give you 12.5 frames per note 🤔
Getting the clap frames right not once but TWICE is insane! It's interesting to see it in the context of Smash and how long it takes to reach the peak of the attack, I need to think about that more for my own stuff.
@@PsychoJosh not sure about that. I mean you could download the video and check frame by frame, but for the lack of other technical possibilities right now I changed the UA-cam Speed to 0,25 and his claps are then pretty much 2 seconds apart (aka exactly 30 fps). Even if would be 1 or 2 frames of that's still insansanly impressive.
@@Otoma You can actually progress the video frame by frame by tapping the "," and "." keys on your keyboard. The first clap was exactly 30. The second (corrected) one, I counted as 17 frames, but I couldn't really see exactly when the hands clapped in the second one.
I'm glad to hear Sakurai talk about frame data for us, and especially showing some examples in fighting games. Once you get deep into them, it'll be crucial to know the start up frames, recovery frames, frame advantage, etc.
People thinking this is Sakurai superhumanly flexing when this is basically an animators head. Useful knowledge nonetheless, and pretty brilliant advice to have an intermediate beat.
This is... interesting. Quite useful actually, for planning ahead. I rely so much on the delta time between frames, but learning to count them, never thought of that.
Sakurai is also secretly a musician. Learning to count out and internalize 120 bpm (a clock’s speed) is one of the first things I learned to do as a percussionist :) 120bpm was also the default bpm setting in WarioWare DIY’s music maker which was also what I used to write some of my first songs ever. Cool stuff!
Okey this is really interesting, usually most Samurai videos feel like condensed versions of other videos I have seen but this one is one of those that truly add something I haven't seen before, really interesting honestly.
As it turns out, being a musician can help tremendously with this. A great many modern songs run at 120 BPM, and that's twice as many beats as there are seconds. Thus, at 120 BPM, every beat takes half a second, or 30 frames exactly. This convenient division made it easy to program into older games that had to sync the music engine with the framerate by necessity, so it was a quite common tempo for video game soundtracks. If you can learn to tap along with your favorite pop songs, then you can train yourself to tap along to a specific number of frames just by picking a song with the right tempo.
I'm not a developer but when its about explaining a movement to someone, i usually try and act it, and i thought that would be my aproach to explain the animations i want in my games but this is so much better and i never considered it, so thanks.
I find it easier to just count seconds and do a little math up front. So stopwatch in hand, press when you want animation to start, and press when you want animation to end. The stopwatch says "0.654". For a framerate of 30 that means 30 * 0.654 = 19.62 = frame 20. So we know a particular animation (or part of) needs to be 20 frames. The benefit is of course that if you want to animate for a framerate of 24, you can easily modify the calculation to be 24 * 0.654 = 13.08 = frame 13. Easier to reuse across projects.
The timing accuracy of Sakurai's claps is just unbelievable. However I would suggest against thinking in term of frames. It only works if the project has a defined framerate that can be achieved on all platforms. And that would also mean putting a FPS cap on the PC version, which is the easiest way to piss PC players. Planning animations and mechanics in milliseconds is way more flexible and would make your game run the same regardless if it's played on a weak platform at 30 FPS or on a PC with high/uncapped framerate.
This is crucial skill in the animation inudstry as well, particularly for (2D hand-drawn) anime. The storyboard marks cut lengths using “seconds plus frames” notation (e.g. 5+4 means 5 seconds plus four frames). Though with anime the assumption is that a second has 24 frames.
If you have a specific plan in mind for the timing of a feature in your game, it is worthwhile to make a debug tool to easily verify that the timing is correct. Even something as simple as a timer on screen which you can record with a screen capture program, then play back the footage to ensure it matches your intentions.
I remember during Byleth's direct where he started to talk about frame data for a second and then was like, "oh nevermind that. This is a children's party game after all."
i feel like a good idea for training this sense while broadening one's horizons might be to learn a simple instrument! getting a good sense of rhythm can help greatly with this sort of thing. beyond just getting a good sense of how long one second is, it will help you understand the proper timing for subdivisions of seconds which will help you time shorter and more specific frame counts better.
Another amazing video as always. After learning to count binary and now being something I regularly do, I now will make sure to learn this as well. As someone who is writing notes about a fighting game, when coming up with new moves, I often don't know the frame numbers in my head instinctively, but I use moves from Smash Bros and other fighting games to gauge how the move should feel. (Ex. A very strong command grab which is balanced by being quite slow, though it has range larger than it appears due to a large grab-box. The character "pushes" their arm out to grab, which takes about as long as Ganondorf's side special in Smash 4. The speed of the animation matches the move as well, as if they're really forcing their arm outwards to grab.)
I think getting a feel for frame timings is just something that comes naturally after working with them for a while. It's a very useful skill if you're tuning numbers a lot, and can save you some iterating. A big part of it is establishing reference points. If you know attack A comes out on frame 9, attack B comes out on frame 18, and are familiar with how each of those feel, you likely already have a good sense of where things land in between. After a while, it just comes second nature, without having to think about it. I remember when Palutena had her Forward Air landing lag nerfed in Smash Ultimate. Just from using the attack a couple times, I could tell it was two frames longer, and sure enough, frame-by-frame showed that's exactly what it was.
As a game designer, the actions you're creating will inevitably have to be measured in frames(or at least normalized frames, if you have accomodations for lag/lag-catchup your FPS vs action speed might not always be consistent), since thats the means by which players can view your world, and having some ability to intuit time relative to frames(which itself is just relative to time, if you can nail 1 second reliably you can probably subdivide for frames), makes it far easier to grasp how fast you actually want things to be Also means you can probably do Running Man 10 seconds in Majora's Mask better
Hoo, boy. That almost reminds me of the time I had to sync certain game actions to music on Game Maker: Studio. Here's a tip: if you composed the music yourself, you should already know how many Beats Per Minute (BPM) the song is. You may have to divide that by seconds (BPM/60) because Game Maker can find track positions by terms of seconds. This is your beat length in seconds, as long as you know a "beat" is a quarter-note. (BeatLength) From there, you can determine which beat you're at with the following (preferably in a Step event): Beat= (audio_sound_get_track_position( insert sound variable here ))/BeatLength ...and use that to help you do actions on the beat. It's literally tied to the sound effect now, lag or no lag. However, you might need to get clever to simplify things like a drummer doing a drum loop for a lengthy song. I know I had to.
Even though this video is primarily about videogames, I can see this information to be very helpful to those who work or are thinking about working in animation in general.
0:04 I feel like this is a reference to something, like another quote somewhere. It's "X is the X by which all things are measured" or something. The itching in my brain tells me it's real.
This is going to lead to a pedagogy where brilliantly creative people are going to be discouraged from becoming game designers for not being good at this.
Nice work making the animations way more crispy and exaggerated! I Was watching smash ultimate with Luigi and Mario! Most of the Nintendo characters got juiced up! Play the update of smash ultimate! We'll it's all smash games really luigi has mad reach! Thanks a million Sakurai! This helped me learn alot more about executing animation!! No more off brand company characters being OP in smash hehe Marth even shits on Kazuya! You are an amazing teacher and 3D doctor! Masahiro is the Super Mario! He shows more traits everyday that he is super mario more than shigeru miyamoto.!! He shows you how to win!!!
I feel like I've had that rhythm go in my head when level designing... but I guess I hadn't considered clapping my hands or making vocal sounds with said rhythm!
A weird concept of time in videogames is that is not a continuous, but an interval, just like you can't have only half a table. This becomes particularly confusing on games with inconsistent frame data like PC. But in general is used as a function to determine both animation and the physics engine. Example: Mario in Mario 64 has a 4 unit/frame^2 of gravity with a terminal velocity of 75 units/frame, as well as a maximum positive velocity of 40 or so (No mimimum. BLG exists) and each jump has a massive amount of acceleration who relied on how fast you are; btw, Mario is like 200 units tall and the game is in theory 30 FPS (In practice is more like 20 due to poor optimization) so those numbers aren't that big in practice. That momentum-based gameplay is CRUCIAL to get a good platforming feeling and a consistent satisfaction, but is also important in every genre period.
Counting frames is all well and good but this doesn't mention the problem of some software "hardcoding" the expected fps/frame time and thus going haywire when run on modern hw with higher framerate (or just different/variable from the target).
![Follow-Throughs Make the Impact [Animation]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/cIB0BUe6Ihk/mqdefault.jpg)
![Follow-Throughs Make the Impact [Animation]](/img/tr.png)
![Meteos [Game Concepts]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/snHecpmPeJs/mqdefault.jpg)
![Games During My Childhood [Grab Bag]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/mDVaOyzO5pY/mqdefault.jpg)
![Jump Physics [Design Specifics]](/img/n.gif)
Of all things I could get from this channel...
I never expected to learn Sakurai's IRL frame-data
Dude's on another level :D
thanks
"Sakurai'a IRL frame data" I never thought I'd see those words together like that
Now we just need to see his hitboxes.
I’m so on board for more Sakurai flexing whatever weird thing he can (minecraft pickaxe to sword, counting to 17 on his hands, clapping a specific number of frames, etc)
Let's not forget his most legendary feat: revealing HE was Master Hand and Crazy Hand by playing a 1v1 between his hands. (His left hand has had problems for years like it is crazy.)
Playing smash with 2 controllers at once.
@@kitsinthewebs222 oooo true!
Every time he does something like this I love him more
He has perfect frame timing irl this guy is just something else
that's because he's been developing games for years, ofc its different with u that doesn't have experiences of making games like him. so its unnecesary to compare
@@aryantzh2028 it's still impressive tho
I do wonder though. It can easily be adjusted in post. When counting the frames just play back the video faster or slower to make it align a frame faster or slower. It does not need to be frame perfect to appear frame perfect in the video.
But if it was done on first try like that for real, it's pretty impressive even for a game dev. But, fighting game devs are also the ones that are absolutely using frame counting the most. So if anyone can do it, it should be fighting game devs and fighting game pro players.
@@Girugi You can go frame by frame on UA-cam with comma and full stop (right of M key)
As far as I can tell Sakurai's 30fps clap is about 29-30 frames long (starting with 1 on impact) on UA-cam
yeah, you can tell that decades of experience have built him a really sharp sense.
I never expected to hear that Sakurai can tell when 60 frames had passed irl with perfect timing.
Sorry for being pedantic but "irl frames" isn't a thing, as Sakurai mentioned this works assuming you're recording at 60fps, so you're essentially counting seconds.
I feel the need to mention it because way too often I see gamers genuinely asking what's the "real life" or "human eye" framerate and it doesn't really work like that.
@@Gabo2oo How did you reach the conclusion and then assert that there is nothing akin to a 'framerate' for real life or the human eye? The statement "it doesn't really work like that" is after all open to interpretation. The human eye kind of does have a framerate in that it can only process optical data at a certain speed, limited by how quickly the rods and cones' photosensitive chemicals can react with photons and then pass their signals electrochemically, with the human brain processing this optical data as an image in approximately 13 milliseconds, with each image being generated discretely and individually, and thus one could argue the human eye has a framerate in its own way. Similarly, there is a proposed theory in physics that time does not move continuously but in smaller quantum discrete simple units, proposed as chronons, with one or two studies lending evidence to the hypothesis that time is itself a product of quantum entanglement. I am not asserting that real life absolutely does work in a literal framerate because that would be silly, but there is credence to the notion that it could work "like that", which is the wording you used. Not to get pedantic.
Well, 60 frames could pass in one second if we are at 60 frames per second, in two seconds if we're at 30 frames per second, in half a second if we're at 120 fps, etc. It depends on the speed.
@@Gabo2oo being accurate to a 60th of a second is still super impressive tbh
You mean one second? Just look at a clock m8 lol
30 and 15 frames were definitely more impressive. Who can do half a second or quarter of a second that well? Besides musicians?
I've been an animator for over 10 years and I found this video to be immensely helpful
Awesome!
meanwhile i had a short but interesting stint with animation many years ago and and with what i learned from that, i walked away from this not understanding what this video was getting at.😵
a lot of these videos are very insightful and then a small few have me scratching my head...
@@ArcRay20 The video is about instinctively feeling the timing and rhythm no matter the frame rate. To know exactly how much a half or quarter or an 8th of a second is and being able to notice when it's wrong.
It's risky to do frame-perfect tricks in a live run but Sakurai doesn't shy away from that.
I used the < and > keys to advance the video frame by frame. He was actually perfectly timed. It was real... Sakurai can clap in perfect frame counts. WTF
When he did the quick clapping back to back here is the frame count of his claps. 30, 30, 31, 30, 30, 31. At first, I thought it was 31 a bunch instead of 30, but then I realized I counted the final frame that his hands touched twice. Once for the frame they touched, and once again after I wrote the number down. So I subtracted 1 from every number and came up with the 30, 30, 31, 30, 30, 31. Crazy!
I feel like I had to have counted wrong, but I don't want to count it all over again lol.
The weirdest thing is when he did the 15-frame clap I actually thought that was a little fast for 15 frames as well! I've played too much Smash XD
30 frames can be trivialized as just half a second, and 15 a quarter of a second. So if you can internalize how long a second is, it makes halves or quarters much easier to time, especially if you have experience keeping rhythm.
It also means he has 1/30 of a second, or 0.0333 seconds, of error margin. That doesn't seem like a lot but it's actually not that bad.
But all this doesn't really matter since you're not counting frames as much as you are counting seconds. If this footage was shot on 240 frames per second then you would count 240 frames in the same amount of time, so really why not just say "this is 1 second" and get a constant out of it?
No difference from professional musicians. Impressive but not too far out there.
Just like ppl with music training (me included) counting multiples of beat per second/60frames per second is the most natural timing
@@CaseyHofland You count the frames because when you are making a game, depending on what type it is, you may have certain things happening at certain frames. For example you may have the hitbox appear for a certain attack at frame 6 and that is how you input it in the game engine. Since you are often working with the frames it is better to understand it like that. If you understand it as seconds you would still have to convert it into frames when making the game or refer to it a 1/60th of a second which isn't as effective. Then if something makes the game run at half speed would you say that 1 second runs in 2 seconds or would you say that it runs at 30fps? At that point you are back to talking about it as frames again.
So TLDR: A game is made in frames per second and runs in frames per second. Having a good understanding about the "flow" of frames is a specialized skill that can be an advantage when working on a game.
Counting frames like Sakurai does it is as straight forward as counting seconds, which is obviously gonna be more difficult for some people over others. One thing that managed to help me a lot is listening to songs that run at 120bpm! That's 120 "beats per minute", or in other words "Exactly two beats every second".
My personal song of choice is Lemon Demon's "Dinosaurchestra Part 1", but some popular songs that run at 120bpm include:
- Tik Tok - Ke$ha
- Call Me Maybe - Carly Rae Jepsen
- Dynamite - Taio Cruz
- Wrecking Ball - Miley Cyrus
...Now, play 1:22 in the video again, while playing one of the above songs in your head 😛
Awesome
"Happy Together" by the Turtles - the song used in Smash 64's commercial - is also 120 BPM. However its notes are in triplets, so it's better suited for counting 10- or 20-frame intervals than 15.
popular songs include:
-Megalovania
I feel like I can date the period you learned to do this based on the popular songs you used as examples 😂
@@Kithara1117 Honestly, no, I only picked those songs because they were songs I personally recognized when I googled "Songs with 120bpm"... Though you'd still reasonably be able to glean my rough age-group using that selection nonetheless 😛
The fact that he just instinctively knows how long a frame is. This man never ceases to surprise me with his immense knowledge and skill.
Sakurai-san showing off the power he has accumulated through the years for 3:48 seconds straight while delivering a very important and yet very entertaining lesson is nuts, thank you.
... a minute is not 100 seconds.
I think it's important to make a distinction between frame rendering times and game logic time increments (what may be referred to as "ticks") which should run separately. Tying game ticks to frame rendering times causes issues if rendering times vary like when lag occurs.
Yeah. Using rendered frames as the time base for physics and input is a very obsolete design. It worked in the 8/16 bit days when you had a fixed 60Hz refresh no matter what.
Aye, as an example Unity's Update method runs on every frame. A newbie mistake is to put "timer++" inside it.
It will go up by 1 on every frame, meaning going from 30FPS to 60FPS doubles the speed. "timer + 1 * Time.deltaTime" will use the time in-between frames to smooth it out.
can confirm, do NOT try to play skyrim at 144hz
Unless it's an online game and the lag is because of that it shouldn't matter. NES and SNES games are very laggy
@@BenightedAlizar time delta's have some pretty big downsides though. When it comes to game physics, most games are better off having their physics update in fixed time increments over dividing by time deltas because it makes the engine behavior predictable and reproducible.
Sakurai learning counting in binary and now frames...this man is a real bless.
You made me search "sakurai binary". I didn't know there was such a way to count with the fingers, though if you know binary already it's pretty straighforward, since you're just keeping your finger straight to indicate 0, and fold it to indicate 1. Now, the frame perfect clapping... This is honestly amazing.
This whole channel is a master class, he breaks the fundamentals down so easily for new developers and old alike. Always interesting to see his work flow and how he correlates everyday things into ways it can be used at a high level development.
This whole adding "and" in between beats is basically how we teach music rythm, and is hella helpful. What a chad
From a music sense, Sakurai is describing the 1 e A & method of beat subdivision. If you want to practice and hone this, I actually found a few years back, if you watch the melee intro vid, you can get a sense of this from watching the clips of fighters in conjunction with the music. for example, marios moves he performs before bowser comes on screen or even better, the clips before we see pre rendered Sheik. Those video clips-in conjunction with the music, if you count the beats of any new vid clip that comes on screen,is a decent example of sub divided notes- the notes in between. listen to the musical phrases and count how many clips of action happen between those phrasings before pre rendered Sheik appears. We can think of the musical phrasings as taking up 4 beats that repeats twice. the video clips offer a subdivision of those 4 beats. Reply if you want the precise time of the video clips from melees intro to try this little subdivision experiment. I post this because rhythym and subdivision is a important musical concept that not everyone can intuit.
Frame data.
How on Earth did he do that perfectly. COOL.
Perfect input frames in realworld time.
Notes Taken.
This is not just helpful for developer. But also helpful for fighting game beginner like me to learn frame data.
Oh boy! Time for my musical experience to help!
My frame of reference is a standard Sousa March, which is 120 BPM-in other words, every measure (2 beats) is one second. So each beat is half a second, or 30 frames (assuming our game is running at 60 FPS). Half a beat is 15 frames. Count a measure in triplets, and you have three 20-frame intervals. I tend to use deltaTime when programming in case performance dips, but the values themselves are determined by calculating frames in a 60-FPS gameplay environment.
1:36 Sakurai is literally teaching the musical concept of subdivision here lol.
Dude is so versed in games that HE CAN CLAP ACTUAL FRAMES IRL WTF!?
Definitely one of the most important things a speedrunner has to know especially for nailing frame perfect tricks/skips
The master game developer of one of the most infamous crossover fighting games in history certainly has a rhythm for frame rates.
He's been working on a fighting game before. Makes sense.
@@Trimint123 Smash isn't a fighting game
@@PsychoJosh You beat each other up. It's a fighting game.
@@Trimint123 Always have this same conversation with Smash players who want to broaden the definition of fighting game to something completely vague, just so Smash falls under the definition. It doesn't and it never will. Smash isn't a fighting game. A game where you "beat each other up" doesn't necessarily mean it's a fighting game. Streets of Rage isn't a fighting game, nor is Doom, nor is Elden Ring, nor is For Honor.
@@PsychoJosh this is why you need to learn how game design works. smh.
It's not that complicated to see which one is a fighting game and which one is a beat 'em up
Sure, fighting game were mostly 1v1. (Well with the exception of KOF and TTT, with their tag-team concept)
Smash main gameplay is literally fighting game with health indicators and the variative number of players joining the fray, figuring stuff to get your opponents out of the ring.
There's a REASON why Me
lee is really that good for competitive match.
Something I learned from Music is how to subdivide the beats even further and make it easier to say out loud. Mr. Sakurai used 1-and-2-and, but you can take it even faster using 1-e-and-a-2-e-and-a. Of course, that's probably not necessary, but it may still come in handy some day.
In this context (60fps = 120bpm) it'd be handier to count triplets (1-and-a-2-and-a-3...) so each note is 10 frames; straight sixteenths (1-e-and-a-2-e-...) would give you 12.5 frames per note 🤔
Getting the clap frames right not once but TWICE is insane!
It's interesting to see it in the context of Smash and how long it takes to reach the peak of the attack, I need to think about that more for my own stuff.
He didn't get it right, the video just said he did.
@@PsychoJosh not sure about that. I mean you could download the video and check frame by frame, but for the lack of other technical possibilities right now I changed the UA-cam Speed to 0,25 and his claps are then pretty much 2 seconds apart (aka exactly 30 fps). Even if would be 1 or 2 frames of that's still insansanly impressive.
@@Otoma You can actually progress the video frame by frame by tapping the "," and "." keys on your keyboard. The first clap was exactly 30. The second (corrected) one, I counted as 17 frames, but I couldn't really see exactly when the hands clapped in the second one.
@@AskWaffles bringing the knowledge with the keyboard shortcuts, nice!
@@PsychoJosh source? because you literally count frames in youtube...
So Sakurai can just feel frames perfectly, awesome
OK, how on earth did he do that clapping PERFECTLY????
Clapping per Second wasn't that hard. That's pretty much it.
Rhythm gaming
lots of editing maybe ?
You mean at 0:16?
@@spellsnare You can check for yourself by analyzing the video. His hand motions are only one or two frames off at certain times.
I'm glad to hear Sakurai talk about frame data for us, and especially showing some examples in fighting games. Once you get deep into them, it'll be crucial to know the start up frames, recovery frames, frame advantage, etc.
People thinking this is Sakurai superhumanly flexing when this is basically an animators head. Useful knowledge nonetheless, and pretty brilliant advice to have an intermediate beat.
This is... interesting. Quite useful actually, for planning ahead. I rely so much on the delta time between frames, but learning to count them, never thought of that.
I hope you feel better soon! This video was very informative. I lack understanding when it comes to the issue of frames, so this was interesting.
Sakurai is also secretly a musician. Learning to count out and internalize 120 bpm (a clock’s speed) is one of the first things I learned to do as a percussionist :)
120bpm was also the default bpm setting in WarioWare DIY’s music maker which was also what I used to write some of my first songs ever. Cool stuff!
Jeez, he was SPOT ON with counting frames, that's insane! That only comes with years of experience, very impressive 😲
Okey this is really interesting, usually most Samurai videos feel like condensed versions of other videos I have seen but this one is one of those that truly add something I haven't seen before, really interesting honestly.
he just casually hit us with just frame clap tech, this man is legendary
As it turns out, being a musician can help tremendously with this. A great many modern songs run at 120 BPM, and that's twice as many beats as there are seconds. Thus, at 120 BPM, every beat takes half a second, or 30 frames exactly. This convenient division made it easy to program into older games that had to sync the music engine with the framerate by necessity, so it was a quite common tempo for video game soundtracks. If you can learn to tap along with your favorite pop songs, then you can train yourself to tap along to a specific number of frames just by picking a song with the right tempo.
Sakurai manages to do this so perfectly, too... really, I'm impressed. Great wisdom as always!
Sakurai's out here casually hitting the frame-perfect tricks.
Learning and practicing music will help a lot to keen this sense too, a very useful skill for any designer anyway
Counting the frame intervals brings me back to band class. 1-and-2-and-3-and-4!
pls the clap timing was so impressive he's too good
I'm not a developer but when its about explaining a movement to someone, i usually try and act it, and i thought that would be my aproach to explain the animations i want in my games but this is so much better and i never considered it, so thanks.
i really wasn't expecting to see romancing saga 3 in a sakurai video about counting frames, but yet here we are
I find it easier to just count seconds and do a little math up front.
So stopwatch in hand, press when you want animation to start, and press when you want animation to end. The stopwatch says "0.654". For a framerate of 30 that means 30 * 0.654 = 19.62 = frame 20. So we know a particular animation (or part of) needs to be 20 frames.
The benefit is of course that if you want to animate for a framerate of 24, you can easily modify the calculation to be 24 * 0.654 = 13.08 = frame 13. Easier to reuse across projects.
0:17-0:22
Dude, the way he timed that out perfectly is insane.
This video was just an excuse for Sakurai to flex his timing skills, and I love it.
Another awesome video by Sakurai! I will definitely have to try his technique next time I'm counting!
Amazing! It’s kinda like counting beats in music. Just love it!
This is one thing all those years of band in school really helped a lot with.
This is really a music lesson and he's just teaching how to subdivide a beat.
Sakurai: I AM the frame data. 👏
The timing accuracy of Sakurai's claps is just unbelievable.
However I would suggest against thinking in term of frames. It only works if the project has a defined framerate that can be achieved on all platforms.
And that would also mean putting a FPS cap on the PC version, which is the easiest way to piss PC players.
Planning animations and mechanics in milliseconds is way more flexible and would make your game run the same regardless if it's played on a weak platform at 30 FPS or on a PC with high/uncapped framerate.
A hallmark of any competitive fighting game player.
amazing frame-counting skill, sakurai!
This is a method drummers use to keep time; it's called subdivision
Coney NEEDS to react to the first 45 seconds of this IMMEDIATELY holy fuck
This is crucial skill in the animation inudstry as well, particularly for (2D hand-drawn) anime. The storyboard marks cut lengths using “seconds plus frames” notation (e.g. 5+4 means 5 seconds plus four frames). Though with anime the assumption is that a second has 24 frames.
It's like music time signatures. Immensely helpful.
I usually do something similar but with my teeth, since it’s faster to chatter than clapping
If you have a specific plan in mind for the timing of a feature in your game, it is worthwhile to make a debug tool to easily verify that the timing is correct. Even something as simple as a timer on screen which you can record with a screen capture program, then play back the footage to ensure it matches your intentions.
A gentleman and a scholar. ありがとうございます
I remember during Byleth's direct where he started to talk about frame data for a second and then was like, "oh nevermind that. This is a children's party game after all."
I always knew learning music in school would be useful at some point.
Saw the thumbnail and thought Sakurai was gonna teach us about music in gaming.
Still, a useful video on counting frames like they were beats.
Sakurai irl has perfect frame data, no wonder he created Brawl Metaknight
Thank you Sakurai, Very Cool!
Man can still hit his links. Respect.
Protect this man at all costs, he's a national treasure.
Note: this only works if the game actually runs at a steady 60fps.
That's the whole point. If you have a good sense of what 30fps feels like, you can immediately tell if your game is not running smoothly.
i feel like a good idea for training this sense while broadening one's horizons might be to learn a simple instrument! getting a good sense of rhythm can help greatly with this sort of thing. beyond just getting a good sense of how long one second is, it will help you understand the proper timing for subdivisions of seconds which will help you time shorter and more specific frame counts better.
Mr. Sakurai really knows his stuff
My man got 30 frames on the DOT! That KoF background starting to sound a whole lot more believable.
Sakurai's teaching basic music theory and animation at the same time lol
Another amazing video as always. After learning to count binary and now being something I regularly do, I now will make sure to learn this as well. As someone who is writing notes about a fighting game, when coming up with new moves, I often don't know the frame numbers in my head instinctively, but I use moves from Smash Bros and other fighting games to gauge how the move should feel. (Ex. A very strong command grab which is balanced by being quite slow, though it has range larger than it appears due to a large grab-box. The character "pushes" their arm out to grab, which takes about as long as Ganondorf's side special in Smash 4. The speed of the animation matches the move as well, as if they're really forcing their arm outwards to grab.)
I think getting a feel for frame timings is just something that comes naturally after working with them for a while. It's a very useful skill if you're tuning numbers a lot, and can save you some iterating. A big part of it is establishing reference points. If you know attack A comes out on frame 9, attack B comes out on frame 18, and are familiar with how each of those feel, you likely already have a good sense of where things land in between.
After a while, it just comes second nature, without having to think about it. I remember when Palutena had her Forward Air landing lag nerfed in Smash Ultimate. Just from using the attack a couple times, I could tell it was two frames longer, and sure enough, frame-by-frame showed that's exactly what it was.
Frames and human reactions is why I think games feel similar and a lot of action rpg fights look like the same game with different skins
Mr. Sakurai telling us he's been playing Hi-Fi RUSH without telling us he's been playing Hi-Fi RUSH
Never had considered this would be an important skill, but I guess I can see the merit of it.
Some games need things to be frame perfect to combo or counters or avoid damage.
As a game designer, the actions you're creating will inevitably have to be measured in frames(or at least normalized frames, if you have accomodations for lag/lag-catchup your FPS vs action speed might not always be consistent), since thats the means by which players can view your world, and having some ability to intuit time relative to frames(which itself is just relative to time, if you can nail 1 second reliably you can probably subdivide for frames), makes it far easier to grasp how fast you actually want things to be
Also means you can probably do Running Man 10 seconds in Majora's Mask better
Sakurai's knowledge on Frame Data is crazy
That is such a weird video advice yet it's surprisingly relevant.
Hoo, boy.
That almost reminds me of the time I had to sync certain game actions to music on Game Maker: Studio. Here's a tip: if you composed the music yourself, you should already know how many Beats Per Minute (BPM) the song is. You may have to divide that by seconds (BPM/60) because Game Maker can find track positions by terms of seconds. This is your beat length in seconds, as long as you know a "beat" is a quarter-note. (BeatLength)
From there, you can determine which beat you're at with the following (preferably in a Step event):
Beat= (audio_sound_get_track_position( insert sound variable here ))/BeatLength
...and use that to help you do actions on the beat. It's literally tied to the sound effect now, lag or no lag. However, you might need to get clever to simplify things like a drummer doing a drum loop for a lengthy song. I know I had to.
Woah I’ve been learning to do just that, I had no idea it was a must.
Even though this video is primarily about videogames, I can see this information to be very helpful to those who work or are thinking about working in animation in general.
My man is insane! Holly cow!
A day when Sakurai posts is a great day.
"I'm just the guy who wanted to make a fun party game"
I used to dread learning frame data. But it's how I needed to improve in fighting games.
Kinda cool how his breakdown is so similar to how counting in music gets broken down
I imagine this is even more important for rhythm-based games
0:04
I feel like this is a reference to something, like another quote somewhere.
It's "X is the X by which all things are measured" or something.
The itching in my brain tells me it's real.
I figured it out, I was thinking of Persona 3 and "The Arcana is the means by which all is revealed"
This is going to lead to a pedagogy where brilliantly creative people are going to be discouraged from becoming game designers for not being good at this.
Nice work making the animations way more crispy and exaggerated! I Was watching smash ultimate with Luigi and Mario! Most of the Nintendo characters got juiced up! Play the update of smash ultimate! We'll it's all smash games really luigi has mad reach! Thanks a million Sakurai! This helped me learn alot more about executing animation!! No more off brand company characters being OP in smash hehe Marth even shits on Kazuya! You are an amazing teacher and 3D doctor! Masahiro is the Super Mario! He shows more traits everyday that he is super mario more than shigeru miyamoto.!! He shows you how to win!!!
Sakurai is your virtual college professor at this point.
And this is why Forza Horizon is having all kinds of weird little timing issues, because people playing on different framerates can race each other
I feel like I've had that rhythm go in my head when level designing... but I guess I hadn't considered clapping my hands or making vocal sounds with said rhythm!
What a flex with that clapping! Such a badass.
This man can do anything my brain was just fryed this episode im really not good with numbers
This technique is also used in music to keep tempo.
1:10 This timing only works for 60 fps projects indeed. I use a different timing for my film and animation projects that are 24 fps.
yeah, animating in 60 would me madness
A weird concept of time in videogames is that is not a continuous, but an interval, just like you can't have only half a table. This becomes particularly confusing on games with inconsistent frame data like PC. But in general is used as a function to determine both animation and the physics engine.
Example: Mario in Mario 64 has a 4 unit/frame^2 of gravity with a terminal velocity of 75 units/frame, as well as a maximum positive velocity of 40 or so (No mimimum. BLG exists) and each jump has a massive amount of acceleration who relied on how fast you are; btw, Mario is like 200 units tall and the game is in theory 30 FPS (In practice is more like 20 due to poor optimization) so those numbers aren't that big in practice. That momentum-based gameplay is CRUCIAL to get a good platforming feeling and a consistent satisfaction, but is also important in every genre period.
Sakurai is TAS-only
Counting frames is all well and good but this doesn't mention the problem of some software "hardcoding" the expected fps/frame time and thus going haywire when run on modern hw with higher framerate (or just different/variable from the target).