If you have an attack speed system in your 3D game and you want it to affect your animations, would you have to seperately make animations for each attack speed acquirable in game?
I know Warcraft III has the animations affected by attack speed...
I'm not an artist myself. I'm a game designer, but I figured this would be the best place in GameDev.net to ask something like this.
Is there a way to program the speed of the animation and how many frames it uses?

3D animations are typically assigned a duration, and the keyframes are interpolated. So it's actually quite trivial to scale the duration of an animation based on character stats.

So how should I explain how it's done in my GDD? Just make up some system where speed affects the frames of the attack animation?

Why is the frame numbers relevant to the designer or the GDD? Isn't it easier, and way more useful, to measure time in seconds, milliseconds etc.? The exact number of frames shouldn't be micromanaged anyways.

Why is the frame numbers relevant to the designer or the GDD? Isn't it easier, and way more useful, to measure time in seconds, milliseconds etc.? The exact number of frames shouldn't be micromanaged anyways.

Yes. All of the game engines I've seen support scaling animation in terms of time, rather than number of frames. The actual number of frames rendered during that time may depend on the frames-per-second that the renderer can achieve at any given time.

I was told to do it in frames...but whatever. I can switch to time, since I haven't written very many animations in my GDDs yet.
I still don't know if I'll make agility affect your attack speed...I don't really know what else to make it affect.