Game speed system limits

[Kinoko]

I need to increase the speed of my game to at least 200fps. I read in the manual that a 486 won't be able to handle 80fps. That doesn't bother me too much, I doubt too many people are running their games on machines like that, but I wondered about what speed do people think is the limit while still keeping the average computer user able to run the game? I'm hoping to go to about 350, but I don't want to stop too many people from being able to play the game.

[Gilbert]

In my opinion 100 is damn high already.

One reason you don't need to use even higher FPS is that the refresh rate of a monitor would seldomly be that high anyways (and your eyes can't distinguish the difference), so even if your game runs at high speed, the screen won't (can't) be updated as often as you want it to be (so it can't show all the frames in that 200 game loops, it's just a waste in processor power using high rates).

Moreover, talking about TV outputs, generally for consoles, the rate was just 60Hz for NTSC and 50Hz for Pal (unless you plug the console into some other high tech input).
So in my opinion, I'll choose only 60 as the maximum limit, which should be quite smooth already (unless it's a 3D detailed polycrap FPS that favour higher rate to make you more dizzy).

[Kinoko]

Well, it wasn't for the look that I was doing it. It was because I wanted more 'detail' in the character's movement. As it was, if I just hit the keys to move him (say, a "one step" movement), he'd move a significant number of pixels forward which was rather annoying and made it difficult to position him with any amount of accuracy. The thing that made a difference was dropping his movement speed but to get his -actual- speed back up to normal, I had to increase the game speed. I've been playing around with it and I can get it to a pretty decent state using a game speed of 150 but I'll try to get that down too...

[Gilbert]

Hmmm I think you can use SetCharacterSpeed() to change their speed if required. I think it may not be a very good solution sacrifying processor power by changing the game speed solely for character speed adjustment.

Talking about the moving speed, I think I'll recommend CJ to rethink of the possibility of implementing this.

[Kinoko]

Sounds like an excellent suggestion. What I'm doing for now is setting my game speed to 80 (it's getting down, it's getting down...) and playing with the character speed/animation speed values. It's still not great, because if I give it the speed I want, and set the animation speed to what looks normal, the character skips about 9 pixels with each step. I can alter either of these values to descrease that pixel count, but then the speed is too slow, or the animation speed doesn't match the walking speed. It's proving very difficult to find a combination that works as well as decreasing that pixel count. I don't think I'm going to be able to do it.

I don't understand this stuff terribly well, but I gather your suggestion would probably work well for me in this.

EDIT: I've managed to get something that works pretty well going at 80fps. I don't think this speed is too bad. Hopefully it'll work on P133s and things like that.

EDIT2: I've been having a think about it and I think it comes down to the responsiveness of the program to button presses. I can't just tap the button extremely quickly and have the character move, it has to be a proper -press-. On a SNES or something, you can just tap a direction pad as quick as... something really quick... and have it respond. So, there's nothing to be done about it, this is just the way it works. I think I'm okay right now with my 80fps

[Bernie]

I was wondering if you're working with the anti-glide mode on? From reading through this thread, it sounds like it is on, what with a character skipping nine pixels forward.

Anyway, I get a smooth, rpg-ish looking movement at 60 FPS with the following set-up...

anti-glide off
Movement Speed: 1
Animation Speed: 5

....and at 50 FPS with Speed 2 as well. The keypresses are very responsive, too. Just a tap is enough to move him.

Maybe you want anti glide on for the looks, or maybe I'm just not completely understanding your problem - if that's the case, enlighten me, please!

[Kinoko]

Hmm, I would, but it really does look odd without Anti-glide mode on. I think I'll stick with anti-glide on, 80fps, 6 Movement Speed and 8 Animation Speed.

[Pumaman]

In the System Requirements section of the manual, you can see an approximation of the CPU required in order to run the game at 40 fps at various resolutions.

To get 80 fps, I guess you can roughly double the estimate there.