KalOfTheRathi
CowTek
168
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Posted - 2013.01.17 18:31:00 -
[1] - Quote
30 FPS is standard for many reasons. Some, unfortunately, are very technical.
TL;DR
Will probably cause massive glitching, clipping, collision problems and crashes. Enjoy!
Technical-ish reply.
Depending on how physics are done as well as a few other things it might not be doable at all. When the individual programmers are making things happen they have several ways to decide on how much to do in a given time slice. If the slice is 1/30 of a second then movement, hit tracking, vehicle dynamics and player animations (all animations in fact) are using a pre-calculated value. Much faster and produces a consistent product. At the worst the entire game would have to be rewritten to handle the flexible time slice that would be needed to provide the flexible FPS.
When they are Not using a specific time slice each individual action will have to find out how much time it has to use. 60 FPS will use half the time value (Surprise, surprise. I know you aren't that dumb really) but any value faster will require knowing how many animation frames will be used or calculated. That goes for slower then 30 FPS as well.
The result is we get skipping when we have many players throwing bullets, grenades, bodies and vehicles everywhere. This is really only the result of having a herd of PS3s connecting via 160ms pings to the server and their attempt to resolve positions across all of them as one and at one. Hard to do. First successful attempt was by id Software via John Carmack.
If you have played Dark Souls on the PC there are mods available for it. One will unlock the 30 FPS limit. Many, many crashes are the results. I have no recent news to believe that has been overcome. It would mean (like for DUST) all the animations would have to be redone so a variable frame rate could be supported.
A second thought is to realize how the server that handles EVE Online functions. Look up the post on the Burning by the Doom Swarm this last summer (EVE players please correct this and/or update the event). They use Time Dilation TiDi to balance activity on the server. How that effects us, I have no idea. But I would be amazed if it didn't in the future. Just saying.
MAG built a Really Super Duper Different Server Architecture (tm). According to them. It did not work as expected nor as advertised and that is part of why the game is technically a failure. Financially, it certainly is. Game play wise it is better than many but the point is moot since it is a proprietary design. They have yet to write a paper about that I have seen. So comparing any game to MAG is just a waste of cycles. MAG is what it is. A financial failure and will probably cause any other game provider to shy away from it.
Using a MAG server design may not matter at all to EVE anyway. Their server architecture is pretty standard setup. I suspect that their front end proxy solution is the most fascinating part (to geeks like me anyway). The back end could be any number of configurations considering that they are handling two radically different games with significant different functionality.
If more information is needed try searching for postmortems on any multiplayer game design. Gamasutra is a reasonable web site to start with. |