old games play too fast

[tevadar webforumsuser@macromedia.com]

With the much faster CPUs of today, many of the older games we had developed several years ago are unplayable. Does anyone know how to control this? I took a class several years ago and vaguely remember a command in a moviescript. Something like cpuHogTicks.

What are you guys doing to control this?

Joe

[JB]

Suitable coding techniques can make the play speed more consistant.

Where you have loops animating objects you might add delay times like


repeat with i = 1 to 20
waitEnd = the milliseconds
sprite(10).locH = i * 10
updateStage
-- avoids accumlated errors with running waitend
waitEnd = waitEnd + 50 -- 20 fps speed
repeat while the milliseconds > waitEnd
end repeat
end repeat
end

Throttling the score tempo setting back can help, in the old days some
people had the bad habit of cranking the tempo setting all the way up
to 60, althought the cpu rendering speed ended up effecting controling
the speed.

[Dave Mennenoh]

The way to control it is to base your movements on time instead of frame. If
you do that then the frame rate is irrelevent. As a quick example - say you
want to move something 500 units in 2 seconds.

This would be your setup:

millIncrement = 500 / 2000.0 --how much to move per timeslice
lastTime = the milliseconds

Then on every frame - such as in an enterFrame:

currentTime = the milliseconds
elapsedTime = currentTime - lastTime

amountToMove = elapsedTime * millIncrement

You would then move your sprite, or object, by amountToMove and then
finally:

lastTime = currentTime

to reset the timer... See?
You just get the amount of time that passes between updates and move your
sprite by that amount of time multiplied by the amount to move per
timeslice. Does that make sense? <shameless plug>It's how I did all of the
animation timing on my xyz*bert game - it doesn't matter if it runs at 20fps
or 80fps, things still take the same amount of time.
[url]http://www.blurredistinction.com/dev/xyzbert.htm[/url] </shameless plug>


PS - I gotta give props to Brian Robbins for his great explanation of this
to me in the first place, which _finally_ made it sink in...
--


Dave
[url]http://www.blurredistinction.com/director[/url]

[Andrew Morton]

> repeat while the milliseconds > waitEnd

> end repeat

NNNNNOOOOOOOO!!!!!

Blocking out everything else with a repeat loop is, in general, a BAD IDEA.
Using updateStage in such a fashion will also break other animations, especially
if they use on prepareFrame.

Andrew

[tevadar webforumsuser@macromedia.com]

Thank you gentlemen,

I'll give these a try.

Now all I have to do is dust the cobwebs off of my lingo skills and get to work :)

Much appreciated,
Joe

[John Dowdell]

The framerate in a Director or Flash file is the top limit... frames
will not play faster than what you specify.

If those older movies had a very high framerate, one that they could not
reach on older computers, then they might come closer to executing your
instructions on faster machines, true.

jd




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John Dowdell, Macromedia Developer Support, San Francisco CA
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