Comments on: Wright On Sporn: “Some of it’s really good”

By: Mitch

Mitch — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 19:20:55 +0000

With high speed photography, like filming bullets in flight, the frame rates go up into the thousands of frames per second. Then they play the film back at 24/30 fps so what took 100 frames in a 10th of a second now takes about 4 seconds to watch. Also, epic derail.

By: Calabi

Calabi — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:05:43 +0000

I played through quite a bit of half life at about 10 frames a second when I bought my first pc. I thought “So this is what pc games are like, great graphics but really stuttery, its wierd but I guess I can live with it”. Then I bought a voodoo2 a couple of weeks later and realised no, thats not how its meant to be played.

By: EyeMessiah

EyeMessiah — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:28:35 +0000

I have a friend who played DeusEx all the way through at about 10fps and he said he quite liked it because it gave him more time to aim.

By: Gap Gen

Gap Gen — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:50:54 +0000

Will Wright? More like willywright. As in someone who makes willies.

By: Alexander

Alexander — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:14:15 +0000

I was going to give everyone AlexW’s answer; he’s totally correct on this, Muzman said it first though.

By: Butler`

Butler` — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:22:04 +0000

If you can’t tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps i’d get glasses. Or actually look at your monitor.

By: bombtrack

bombtrack — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:14:57 +0000

30 fps is fine for a strategy game. My antique laptop runs TA and freeciv at <10 fps so I can clearly see the refreshes and they’re still playable.

edit: or maybe there’s codeine in the water here or something.

By: Clicky

Clicky — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:04:58 +0000

Actually, it doesn’t have to be Robitussin, it can be anything that contains enough codeine, which produces the effect.

By: Kestrel

Kestrel — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:27:43 +0000

I heard that Maxis was afraid to go more than 30 fps because at higher rates Spore began to simulate the universe. This could be a problem, especially since the virtual reality in which we are almost certainly living wouldn’t necessarily have the power to run a simulation within the simulation…

Wright and Ocean were on a 3 day spornicating robotrip when this became clear to them…

(I was going for a simultaneous rerail/derail with that one)

By: Mr. Brand

Mr. Brand — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:22:48 +0000

AlexW got it right, in fever words than the novel-sized monologue I was preparing :)

Robitussin was sold in two variants in Ireland, and presumable the UK, a few years ago. If you were so inclined, the one with dextromethorphan would mess you up good (and the additives would hospitalise you in bottle-sized doses) ;)

The real framerate of the universe is what we perceive as the speed of light. When there is lag, the speed of light changes.

(Can we derail it further? CAN WE?)

By: AlexW

AlexW — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:06:12 +0000

The only reason they get away with low framerate in movies and television is that each frame has motion blur, so they blend together better at low speeds than the detailed frames in games.

By: EyeMessiah

EyeMessiah — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 11:51:10 +0000

People used to believe that 16fps was the minimum required for persistance of vision to kick in, but in actual fact the human brain will interpret the difference between images as motion at even lower frame rates that that. This of course does not mean that the quality of the impression of motion is as good as it can get at 16fps. As has been said above, there is nothing special about the 24fps number, and it is certainly not the maximum number of discrete frames per second that human sensory apparatus can detect. The upper limit is probably much higher than that, but varies quite a bit from person to person so afaik a specific threshold hasn’t been determined. From my own experience I’d guess that, like many PC gamers, I can’t detect framerate variations at some point over 60fps.