Max Framerate - Watch Performance (Huawei)

Facer Creator
1

So I’ve been testing out creating animations using the transparency field. With the help from @Mellin I made an in depth tutorial of how to use a conditional expression to essentially recreate an animated gif. One of the things I’ve been curious about has been the performance of animations. I’ve published several that are slow 4-8 frames per second, and several that are fast 10-20/sec. I have also played with a variation on the animation expression in creating longer examples based on the wake functions instead of a simple looping one on the second counter.

Through all of this I’ve noticed the performance is somewhat spotty on faster animations. Even when watching some of the slower ones, there doesn’t seem to be the smoothness I would expect. To experiment further I’ve created several prototype faces:

4 Frames:

5 Frames:

8 Frames:

16 Frames:

Syncing these with my watch the 4, 5, and 8 frame prototypes seems to display all frames consistently. I do still notice that sometimes there’s a herky jerky movement. When I try and sync the 16 frame prototype, I can see the watch only displaying the odd numbers. So only 8 frames are showing per second. Clearly a fail.

So the question becomes, is this a Facer limitation or is it a watch performance limitation? I’d like to see others test additional watches of various brands and see what the outcome is with the experiment. Also when I get some additional time, I will create a 10 and 20 second prototype.

Let me know what happens when you load the faces. Do you see all the frames? Is your’s silky smooth or does it judder and sputter?

My Watch: Huawei
RAM: 512 MB
CPU: 4x Arm Cortez A7 @ 1190 MHz
Cores: 4

2

I’ve designed a few more faces recently.

Title - Last Airbender
Frames - 52
Frame Rate - 8/sec (0.125 seconds)
Expression - #DWE#
Approx Image Size - 26-38 KB

Title - Hop to It
Frames - 12
Frame Rate - 12/Sec (0.083 seconds)
Expression - #Dsm#-#Ds# (i.e. repeat every second)
Approx Image Size - 8.5-10 KB

I’ve noticed that even though the Last Airbender uses less frames a second, the Hop to It animation is much smoother. It must come down to the KB of the images needing to be rendered. The Airbender images are 3-4 times larger. I feel like I get 5-6 frames a second of actual output with this animation.

Again, this may take some more experimentation until Facer supports a true GIF image. Even then, I wonder about the performance. Will the animation lag the timing of the animation even then?

3

Hey @eradicator09,
I think performance mostly centers on CPU power whether it be “frames” or other computational load.

Here’s my aquarium with your timing entries in the X-position instead of transparency. The timing of the fish varies between 6 times and 9 time #DWFSS#. example: $#DWFSS#>210?((#DWFSS#-210)*6):400$

Here’s my thumping woofer with the transparency (speaker in, speaker out) driven by a squarewave function. Short periods are just too fast for the watch to really get that “vibrate” kind of a look. I really had to slow down to partial seconds. For example: (squareWave(#Dsm#,100,0.3,50))

Thanks,
John