Variable/60+ framerate support

[Zeckul]

I have two requests regarding framerate:

 1) Do not tie the simulation speed to framerate as in the Infinity Engine.

 2) Allow for framerates above 60fps and test that they do not cause glitches.

 

By 1) I mean that the framerate should be independent from the game speed, i.e. game time advances at the same rate regardless of the framerate. In the Infinity Engine, if you increased the framerate, it made everything faster.

 

By 2) I mean that sometimes high framerates causes glitches due to floating-point precision issues. Dark Souls is notable for this, where the physics engine was only tested at 30fps and completely breaks down at 120fps, with characters falling through floors etc. 

[AwesomeOcelot]

We've already been over this. The situations that caused Dark Souls and IE games to have these issues are not present, IE games were 2D and Dark Souls is a poor console port.

[Zeckul]

Lol, I even created that thread. I need a memory check 

[Valsuelm]

You do realize that human eyes and the brain that processes the info from them isn't getting anything good out of frame rates as high as you're talking right?

[AwesomeOcelot]

http://us.hardware.info/reviews/4592/vast-majority-of-gamers-prefers-120-hz-monitors
 

Can the human eye "see" 120hz? Yes. Can the human brain process the info? Probable not all of it, but clearly enough to make a big difference. My opinion is 60hz is good enough, 120hz is a big luxury right now, you're better spending the money on better contrast and higher resolution.

[samm]

Black frame insertion or any other blur eliminating technology will be crucial for an image that's subjectively much better. Fortunately, that's coming, unfortunately, at 60 Hz, it flickers a lot. [edit]just realized how off topic that is - sorry for that

Edited February 20, 2014 by samm

[Sabotin]

It's about the smoothness of animation. Which I think might not be such a small deal in this game. I'd imagine it would help a lot with the visual blending of 2d and 3d elements.

Edited February 20, 2014 by Sabotin

[Zeckul]

You do realize that human eyes and the brain that processes the info from them isn't getting anything good out of frame rates as high as you're talking right?

Popular myth, entirely baseless. Look at your mouse cursor. Move your mouse side-to-side quickly enough and you'll easily see individual frames at 60hz. Even at a 120hz it's still easy to see individual frames, although quite a bit better. To re-create perfect illusion of movement would require upwards of 1000fps.

 

Gaming at 120hz is more responsive, more life-like and provides greater clarity of motion.

Edited February 21, 2014 by Zeckul

[Zeckul]

http://us.hardware.info/reviews/4592/vast-majority-of-gamers-prefers-120-hz-monitors

 

Can the human eye "see" 120hz? Yes. Can the human brain process the info? Probable not all of it, but clearly enough to make a big difference.

It's not a matter of "processing every frame", much the opposite really; you want your brain to not be able to tell any individual frame apart. Eyes don't have a framerate anymore than ears have a sampling rate. That we use still images to represent motion is a limitation of technology, not a biological attribute of human beings. 

 

After being exposed to both, I can easily see the difference between 60 and 120hz, especially if I'm interacting with the image (i.e. in a game). 120hz feels less like interacting with a computer and more like being there, although it's still far from being fully convincing.

 

As for PoE, of course being a Baldur's Gate-like game, it's not as important as in a first-person shooter, but going forward 120hz monitors will become more common and the game should natively support that without breaking down (like Dark Souls does).

Edited February 21, 2014 by Zeckul

[BrainMuncher]

I imagine in a game like this you're probably going to want to always have vsync on, with big flat backgrounds tearing will be really noticeable when scrolling.

 

Having animation at greater than 60hz I imagine to be very unimportant for this type of point and click game. I'm not saying there is no difference but since it's not an action game the difference would be negligible.

 

From what I know of unity, all the physics stuff is done at a fixed interval, and the rendering is decoupled and just goes as fast as it can. So if your simulation is reliant on the physics engine then at some point extra framerate isn't really relevant since you're just rendering the same frame over and over in between game updates.

[Sensuki]

I imagine in a game like this you're probably going to want to always have vsync on

 

I never have vsync on in ANY games it is just terrible.