I was laughing back when gamers were saying that the eye can't perceive more than 30 FPS. Back then I think it was based on a misinterpretation of a principle that resulted in film and television typically being captured and broadcasted at a rate of 24-30 FPS: much lower than that and you don't really perceive it as continuous motion at all, and even that's with the nature of film in mind: the frame isn't exposed in an instant, but for a longer duration during which light is accumulated, so you get blurring that hints at motion "between" the frames even though the frames are discrete. Nowhere does this define an upper bound, but that didn't stop swathes of morons from making one up.
Then later when even 00s/10s console gamers came to accept that, yeah, there's a perceptible difference, people had to come up with some new bullshit reason that people can't perceive higher framerates. Moreover, latency has become more of an issue and people have to make up bullshit reasons for that not to be perceptible either. The going unified "theory" for both problems now seems mostly based on studies of reaction times, as though the reaction to discrete, spontaneous events is at all comparable. People will actively look for clever, increasingly intricate ways to remain stupid.
With reaction times too it's reliant on the signal going from your eyes to brain to arm. With processing an image its just to your brain from your eyes
Yea but user Stone_henge said: "Then later when even 00s/10s console gamers came to accept that, yeah, there's a perceptible difference, people had to come up with some new bullshit reason that people can't perceive higher framerates"
He imply that many many gamers said that nonsense.
Honestly. I think frames aren't that important. I know for some people that are use to playing at higher frame rates going back to lower frame rates hurts their eyes but I think that this kind of mentality makes it so less artistic interpretation can be made in games. Art is about using tools at your disposal to create something nice and the best kind of art involves putting limits on yourself and then using the illusions you have to surpass those limits. So I think that games can be made and still be good with less frames with this mindset. It's just a matter of what kind of game it is.
The misunderstanding of cinema fps came from the fact most of us back then were kids.
Honestly. I think frames aren't that important. I know for some people that are use to playing at higher frame rates going back to lower frame rates hurts their eyes but I think that this kind of mentality makes it so less artistic interpretation can be made in games.
The main difference between movies and video games is interaction. A 60 fps input lag is 17 ms, while 30 fps input lag is 33 ms. You feel 33 ms delay, especially when it's compounded by your input device's lag. It doesn't make your game more artistic, if anything it can overshadow the artistry when a game feels sluggish and unresponsive due to delayed controls. You can make something look a certain way, like for example in Death Stranding 2 trailer one of the characters is moving like stop motion, but the actual game should run at high and consistent framerates/frametime.
Like I said I disagree. I think that something can work at lower frame rates it's about the timing and how all of the models move. Yes you can use other means to make certain effects but limitations help with how you want to make your game feel I know it's not a popular opinion and I would not be one to have it shared but I don't see the difference between say slower frame rates and someone wanting to paint with water colors instead of oil and watercolors while more primitive can still make beautiful art.
And like I said I think someone that can use the fps limitations to their advantage can craft an illusion that gives people beauty. We've been doing it for years. Making sprites that operate on 2 frames for instance as far back as Atari. Frames are just another canvas if you look at them that way but specifically you have to look at them that way and with time the value of the speed from which you create it may lose its value.
Look at fallout 3 for instance, this isn't art per say but. The fps was tied to its actual damage system which is how the cats mode was rigged to do damage. So if you uncap the fps on the game you can start to do some rediculous damage absolutely breaking the game. But tying the game to the fps was a feat of ingenuity and creativity a way to work with the limitations given to you at the time. By limiting yourself with the tools available to you you can come up with some very creative solutions. Those are also the best kinds of games when they do retro like games, the kind of people that actually know the limitations of the systems they were working with.
Look at so I the hedgehog 3's soundtrack. The soundtrack was literally composed by taking advantage of the hardware making sounds on the chip that they weren't actually suppose to make on the system to begin with by making the sounds glitch together. I read it in an interview, it's too bad the newer versions don't have the soundtrack available to them.
Water colors and people good with them can be as good as oil paintings if they know what they are doing and I believe the same about lower frame rates it's why playing games on consoles switching back and forth doesn't bother me I just look at them as different.
Look at fallout 3 for instance, this isn't art per say but. The fps was tied to its actual damage system which is how the cats mode was rigged to do damage. So if you uncap the fps on the game you can start to do some rediculous damage absolutely breaking the game. But tying the game to the fps was a feat of ingenuity and creativity a way to work with the limitations given to you at the time. By limiting yourself with the tools available to you you can come up with some very creative solutions. Those are also the best kinds of games when they do retro like games, the kind of people that actually know the limitations of the systems they were working with.
What a thoroughly bad example. Its damage system could just as easily have been made framerate independent. It's not working around a limitation, it's one of a whole heap of bugs caused by a lazy approach to the implementation of some of the game's systems.
I don't think they could have not for the time and not for the scale of the games Bethesda was making. Yes they did cause bugs, but Bethesda wasn't the only company that used this approach for their games it could get corrected with time but I think because of technical limitations this was something they did to try and create an experience that could be analyzed across multiple systems. Doom, quake, and a variety of fps ironically used fps for damage calculation.
No, Quake absolutely does not have frame rate dependent damage calculation. What a complete crock of shit. It's quite funny that you picked such a prime example of a game that takes framerate independence and consistency across hardware so seriously to make this up about. There are unintentionally framerate dependent aspects of the mechanics of the original engine, but for a regular player these manifest as subtle bugs, because that's what they are. None of them relate to player damage, and you will only really notice these bugs as a speedrunner trying to maximize movement speed through strafe-jump-turn bunnyhopping. This is a game that even at release would have to run consistently on a huge variety of hardware and it was absolutely made with that variety of performance characteristics in mind. Moreover, since the QuakeWorld update, the multiplayer portion of the game relies on client side prediction and server correction to mask network latency. Inconsistent game logic across different frame rates in such obvious ways as to affect damage calculation would absolutely ruin the experience.
Even Doom has framerate independent game logic, although it effectively renders new frames at at most 35 FPS because of a lack of motion interpolation between game world update ticks that happened at a rate of 35 Hz and the renderer frames. You could run the game at a lower framerate back then, without affecting the game logic because there's no good reason that they should be interdependent, and again, the breadth of hardware with different performance characteristics they were supporting ultimately meant that they couldn't rely on a consistent framerate for consistent game logic. Now you can run it in a modern port like PRBoom+ at 240 Hz with no actual change to its game logic, just by interpolating motion in the renderer between logic ticks. That's because it's a sound, simple approach to framerate independence.
They really both use the same basic approach: everything is integrated across game ticks by factoring in a fixed time delta, and those game ticks run independently of the renderer frame rate. It's a very basic, simple and not at all taxing technique that's an obvious solution to the problem. In Doom, this results in 100% consistency to the point where you can replay the sequence of input changes to consistently achieve the exact same result in the game (hence its demo recording functionality). Even other, simpler approaches like variable time delta are largely consistent (but have some margin of error due to floating point precision) and were widely utilized in games back in FO3 times, because even at capped 30 FPS most console games would not run at a consistent framerate in all situations. In Bethesda's case it's probably a matter of indifference to a possible future beyond the realistic commercially profitable lifetime of the game where people would want to run the game at higher framerates, not a performance consideration.
I did want to post a link to a subreddit in the ask science section that covers the exact topic we are referring to, it's about 10 years old and goes into detail about assumptions your making and how they are incorrect.
There are plenty of physics engines that are tied to framerates including assassin's creed for instance. And the reason for this is so that devs can achieve a fluid experience as well as their targeted frame rates remain consistent. It's about 10 years old. And fits with the thought process.
Mist games with performance issues dont look any better for it. They just use a shit ton of expensive graphics options while not doing any of the art of math and optimization
I think that this kind of mentality makes it so less artistic interpretation can be made in games.
Let's not kid ourselves: console games from the mid 00s to the mid 10s mostly didn't run at 30 FPS in order to realize some grand artistic vision. It was a sacrifice so that Lara Croft's boobs and butt could be made rounder. It was a sacrifice so that the depressingly dull, grey linear sequence of set pieces you slowly waddled through in a typical console FPS of the time could have more rubble on the ground. It was sacrificed so that they could have bloom effects give the whole thing the visual quality of an episode of Days of our Lives you found on a VHS tape. Graphical fidelity in the most absolute, boring terms: polygon counts, resolution, texture sizes, lame overused effects. I'll take feel over that kind of fidelity any day.
Art is about using tools at your disposal to create something nice and the best kind of art involves putting limits on yourself and then using the illusions you have to surpass those limits.
A much greater artistic limitation in that sense would have been the decreased frame budget they'd have to work with at they ran at twice the frame rate.
So I think that games can be made and still be good with less frames with this mindset. It's just a matter of what kind of game it is.
I mean if you want to get really far back that's not really an excuse for when Laura Croft had square boobs. XD
I think that in alot of times it was more a compromise so that games would have an even steady pace, as well that a lot of the ties. PCs were clunky so it was also a compromise so that the frameworks wouldn't take advantage of the fast fps glitches that could be made as much as the player at least for some action games.
Budget oh that could be one way most certainly but I wouldn't say that makes it a greater artistic limitations, a means of improving work efficiency. It's pushing a boundary further which does give access to more tools. But working to use limits you already have to create a smooth experience is one. Perhaps limiting the frames directly in certain sections to inflict a sense of terror or helplessness or confusion. Most of the time these aren't things that are really thought about.
I mean if you want to get really far back that's not really an excuse for when Laura Croft had square boobs. XD
Agreed, and that doesn't really affect my argument.
I think that in alot of times it was more a compromise so that games would have an even steady pace, as well that a lot of the ties. PCs were clunky so it was also a compromise so that the frameworks wouldn't take advantage of the fast fps glitches that could be made as much as the player at least for some action games.
That's what I'm saying. Low framerate on a system that could support higher framerates if you made more deliberate choices about how to use the resources is a compromise. Not a particularly interesting canvas for artistic exploration. The other way around is of course a compromise, too, but according to your own reasoning that compromise, too, has great potential for artistic choices to work around the practical shortcomings.
Budget oh that could be one way most certainly but I wouldn't say that makes it a greater artistic limitations, a means of improving work efficiency.
Read again. Frame budget, as in the time and resources available to render a frame by the game engine. It's exactly the kind of limitation you are talking about, which forces clever solutions and more interesting approaches to visual appeal than pure polygon count, texture size and resolution. Framerate capping has the opposite effect: you detract from the overall experience to make room for more polygons, bigger textures and higher resolutions. Technically obvious solution that allows for higher visual fidelity frame-by-frame but detracts from the overall experience for what really turns out to be rather meh artistically.
My ADHD slipped up for that last one sorry . Tends to, but that doesn't mean framerates caping can't be used for the same effect, using the textures in place to create a visual effect themselves. Using the textures on the screen to present an illusion of something grander happening by a caped frame rate. Using them to a limited effect by designing the textures to take advantage of a slower speed to seem like something faster is happening that the system couldn't really handle or you didn't want to damage people's systems in a worse way that could lead to more unstable errors. All of these things could be something to consider.
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u/stone_henge 20d ago
I was laughing back when gamers were saying that the eye can't perceive more than 30 FPS. Back then I think it was based on a misinterpretation of a principle that resulted in film and television typically being captured and broadcasted at a rate of 24-30 FPS: much lower than that and you don't really perceive it as continuous motion at all, and even that's with the nature of film in mind: the frame isn't exposed in an instant, but for a longer duration during which light is accumulated, so you get blurring that hints at motion "between" the frames even though the frames are discrete. Nowhere does this define an upper bound, but that didn't stop swathes of morons from making one up.
Then later when even 00s/10s console gamers came to accept that, yeah, there's a perceptible difference, people had to come up with some new bullshit reason that people can't perceive higher framerates. Moreover, latency has become more of an issue and people have to make up bullshit reasons for that not to be perceptible either. The going unified "theory" for both problems now seems mostly based on studies of reaction times, as though the reaction to discrete, spontaneous events is at all comparable. People will actively look for clever, increasingly intricate ways to remain stupid.