Use maximum framerate?

[Silverline webforumsuser@macromedia.com]

Hello,

I was wondering if there is any reason *not* to use the maximum framerate (120 fps) in game development. (bugs, unexpected errors etc.)

This post by Colin Moock got me thinking:

fps is like a speed limit: you can tell a movie not to play faster than the specified fps, and all machines will obey, but you can't tell a movie to stay above a certain frame rate. if a machine doesn't have the processing power to render the frames at the specified fps, the movie will simply run more slowly.

Why not set the framerate to 120 and only use setIntervals to call a function whenever you want. Will this increase the overall speed of a movie? In theory it won't because setInterval is supposed to be completly independant of fps speeds, but yesterday I read the following post on UMBC:

Along the same lines its good to know that setInterval is also not as reliable as you might think. Actual timing and the timing you set won't match up as well as you might like. For example, the actual timing of the interval can be influenced by the set frame rate of the movie. Here are some examples of approximate actual timing for an interval set at 100 milliseconds at different frame rates (thanks to Roger for the information):

1 fps: interval=127 ms
2 fps: interval=125 ms
5 fps: interval=105 ms
10 fps: interval=102 ms
11 fps: interval=183 ms
12 fps: interval=175 ms
15 fps: interval=134 ms

You can see here that 100 milliseconds can be far off from 100 milliseconds to setInterval. Be cautious of this and don't be setting your watches to any Flash setIntervals.


Anyone care to comment?
Thanx in advance,
Jan van der Veen

[urami_]

> I was wondering if there is any reason *not* to use the maximum framerate (120 fps) in game development. (bugs, unexpected errors etc.)
>
> This post by Colin Moock got me thinking:
>
> fps is like a speed limit: you can tell a movie not to play faster than the specified fps, and all machines will obey, but you can't tell a movie to stay above a certain frame rate. if a machine doesn't have the processing power to render the frames at the specified fps, the movie will simply run more slowly.

Well that's the fact .
FPS is not an accelerator , it is a speed limiter .

By setting movie frame to 120 you not actually use 120 fps, probably won't in any near future.
First you can't see 120 FPS , human eye can comprehend up to around 30fps . Monitor usually goes around 60 to 85 Hertz
which is around 60-80 fps , most I came across so far , in office and clients , never set to more than 60 Hertz so if you
set up faster it won't be able to even show that fast on other users monitors .
If you set up yours to higher it won't matter for these who view the file as it depend on end user setting .

By setting high limit for the speed you make movies try to maintain the performance sucking user resources , you can even
make it performing worst than movie set with lower frame rate .
It is not the FPS that matters , you can have same or similar performance on much lower if you
pay attention to optimizing the movies and designing the properly.





Regards


urami_*

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