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Framerates Matter
An anonymous reader writes "As more and more games move away from 60fps, the myth of the human eye only being able to detect 30fps keeps popping up. What's more, most people don't seem to realize the numerous advantages of a high framerate, and there's plenty of those."
HOWEVER
The human mind is evolutionary designed to make instant assumptions. Cat in mid air facing us = DANGER. No "Is it dead and being thrown at us?" No "Is it a picture?" As such, video games can quite easily take advantage of this evolutionary assumptions and trick the MIND, if not the brain. into thinking something is real.
So while a higher frame rate will increase the quality of the game, it is not essential. It's like getting gold plated controls on your car's dashboard. Yes it is a real increase in quality, but most people would rather spend the money on a GPS device, real leather, plug-in-hybrid engines before you get around to putting gold in the car.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
It's way, way way more than that.
The old HL engine -- at least in Natural Selection, but most likely any game on that engine -- your framerate didn't just effect your gravity (which made it so that at certain framerates you could literally jump further, which meant BHopping was sicker)..
it also changed the DPS of weapons. Yep. Weapon firing rate was tied to FPS in a very very odd way. Some dudes did too much testing. Insane.
And you can, visually, tell a difference between 100fps and 50fps and 25fps. Very easily. Takes a few minutes of playing, but there's a clear difference and anybody saying otherwise eats paint chips.
Graphics don't make games good. Graphics can cripple good games. Graphics never make bad games good.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Everyone says a "framerate" (i.e., sample frequency) of 44.1kHz is all that is needed. Yet many people hear better imaging, depth and transparency at higher sample rates.
I've worked with the Doom source code recently, and can confirm that there was no motion blur at all. In fact, blur of any kind couldn't really be implemented, because Doom's graphics were 8-bit indexed colour.
Also, there were no engine changes at all between Doom 1 and 2.
Perhaps the GP is referring to the bobbing effect that occurs when the Doom guy runs. That moves the camera nearer to and away from the ground, changing the appearance of the texture.
You're an immobile computer, remember?
The 30-fps-is-all-you-can-see myth was probably born of the notion that the illusion of continuous movement starts to set in around 25-30fps (in film for example). Therefore actually 30fps is the minimum you need rather than the maximum you can perceive.
I think it's more likely born of the notion that film gives a completely convincing illusion of motion that is not greatly improved by higher frame rates, because the process by which it is created automatically includes motion blur because it's recording continuous data, just broken up into 24 fps. Computer games display discreet moments in time, not many moments blurred together into one picture. That's why film looks smoother than computer games with 3 times the framerate.
Nevertheless, the illusion of continuous movement is apparent at much lower framerates than even film, even in a computer game. Quake's models were animated at 10 fps, and they gave a convincing illusion of movement, and you can probably make due with a lot less since the brain fills in so much. But it's not a completely convincing illusion, and neither is 30, 60, or even 100 when using static instants in time.
But the basic myth comes from the fact that film is so convincing and thus you don't "need" more... as long as each frame is a blurred representation of the full period of time it is displayed for.
The enemies of Democracy are
Because the framerate is high.
There, i've taken it full circle.
mod me funny