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Quote: "lack of animation speed control"
It means just that. Some engines use different kinds of control to affect how speed of events, animations and alike take place.
Engines generally are either time based or frame based, perhaps both.
Animations can play at a certain number of frames per second or can play a specific number of frames over a specified time period. Something of this nature in part exists in FPSC.
A frame based or time based engine too will affect frame rates dependant upon whether or not max frames per second is allowable and utilised. If max frames per second is supported, you have a fast engine and there is no specified max fps specified in code then a game could shoot away to say 150 fps - this allows designers of games with high fps engines to get a lot of content into their game - designed for users of gameplay specific machines - players of the game with powerful systems will get the best from it whereas those with low spec computers would just not be seeing the game as designed to be played as their machine could not keep up with the speeds.
Unlike in the case of FPSC most engines that have more flexible user control of animation and gameplay speeds so a game designer using a fast engine can have an option to allow flexible gameplay speeds or limit them dependant upon the game design and the targeted level of end user systems.
Its all about the end user. Effectively having a choice means you have a choice of the kind of game you can make. A time based system will allow more flexible gameplay speeds which will accommodate a wider range of end users -
Will someone else explain this...its complicated and I making a hash of it. its all about ticks, fps, cpu, display refresh, animation speeds, end user system speeds and how one balances out or can keep up with the others.
In a simple explanation FPSC is not very flexible - I suspect much like fps and decal speeds control of animation speeds for entity animations is only editable via source or its hard coded into the engine.
I am not sure for instance what happens if say you tried to use set an enemy characters speed setting at 500 or 1000 as I have not tried myself - does that speed up his complete animation sequences so that he reloads and shoots like a bat out of hell or does it just increase the speed an enemy moves forward?
