How is a walking animation of a given character designed? I can see two possible ways:
The first way is to draw each frame of the animation such that, if the frames are displayed at position (0,0), the character walk but does not really move (I mean: at frame 10, the character is still at the left, upper corner of the screen). This means that one needs a way to move (translate) the frames manually.
The other way is to draw each frame such that their width grows progressively. Drawing the frame i at position (0,0) will give the impression that the character is really moving (not only walking on the same point). This way is the graphic artist that do all the job, but the animation is completely controlled by him, so he can give a specific style to the walking animation.
The first one seems to be the right way to do things, but one would need a way to say: ok, frame 0 last 50 ms at (0,0), frame 1 last 30 ms at (5, 0), frame 2 last 15 ms at (13, 0) etc...
This makes things much more complicated.
What is the best practices? What way do you usually adopt/suggest?