Proposals for CW3

[Grayzzur]

Usually the 3D rendering is the time consuming part of a frame. By only rendering every 2nd, 3rd or 4th frame, it can be done quicker.. and the frames are allowed to show up as often as the single frames under normal speed. At normal speed, I suspect the game spends a bit of time simply waiting for 1/30th of a second in real time after it's already completed the calculations and rendering for that frame. At 4x, it's still trying to do a frame every 1/30th of a second, but it's calculating 4 frame updates and rendering once in that time. If your computer is not fast enough to do all that in 1/30th of a second, it may slow down the frame rate and look a little laggy.

Technically I think it's possible to slow the game down, you could do 1/2 speed by waiting 1/15th of a second between ticks. However now you're talking about 15 frames per second as well. It probably wouldn't look good.

If you're in a particularly tight situation, you can always pause the game and use N to advance one frame at a time for a bit.

[Relli]

Thank you. That really clears up the confusion I was having. I guess it didn't occur to me that the rendering would be the slowest part.

[Clean0nion]

In one second, a game operates at 30 frames when going at normal speed. Frames are animation pictures on the screen like all those mini-pictures on old VHS tapes.

Faster speed settings skip some frames so that the game is faster, but keeps up with real time as well.

As per slower speeds, I think the issue is that it needs more frames inbetween to work right.

At a speed of 50%, the game would be running at a 15fps framerate. Which would mean frame changes would be visible to the human eye.