Ingame Movement: Choppy Edition

[Steelpoint]

Maybe its just me but I've felt that any form of in game movement has been seemingly getting more choppy and sluggish for some time, far more so than usual. No matter if there's only one person, one hundred or even on a offline server. This would not be a problem if not for that I've played on several other servers that seem to have eliminated, or at least reduced, the effect. One good example is hippiestation where movement is extremely smooth.

Perhaps there's a solution? Or maybe its contrived and I'll be told why hippie is doing something wrong. But I will say that smooth movement feels like heaven.

[Jalleo]

This should be a issue report. This is not a idea but a potential issue...

[Remie Richards]

Correct me if I'm wrong but Hippie may have went the way of Goon, having a different ticklag, something definable in the config that defines the FPS that the game runs at, it defaults to 0.9 and the FPS is calculated as 10/ticklag (so 11.11111FPS) where as other servers which might be using the 0.5 suggestion in the config, would be running at 10/0.5 = 20FPS.

You have to bare in mind though that a lot of SS13 was built around the original 11fps which leads to difficult controls (Ala moving forward one turf in goon is likely to throw you about 2-3 turfs instead since there's more frames for your input to be registered)

R_DEBUG Admins can actually change the FPS live on the servers with the set FPS verb (which actually DOES set FPS, not ticklag in this case, it used to be set_ticklag but carn replaced it cos she's weird.)

[Steelpoint]

Playing around with the FPS was interesting, I found around 16-18 FPS felt and seemed good. Anything above 19 to 20 however seemed to go too fast.

E: Then again around 20ish FPS also seems to work right.

[Miauw]

I think setting FPS also sets ticklag.

[MisterPerson]

People complain that higher fps results in "imprecise" controls right now. I can see why that's the case and agree that it's not good. Higher FPS was the entire goal of that keyboard stuff I was doing. I'll come back to it eventually. We'll have to be careful to ensure that an average tick takes less than tick_lag to complete. Right now it's not even close on Sybil even at highpop unless the singulo is running around.

fps and tick_lag are tied together. Here's a snippet I use in my test project: Setting one sets the other, and both are rounded somewhat.

Code: Select all

/mob/verb/set_world_fps_or_tick_lag()
	set name = "Set fps or tick_lag"
	set category = "Debug"

	switch(input(src, "What do you want to set") as null|anything in list("fps","tick_lag"))
		if("fps")
			var/input = input(src, "Current is [world.fps] with tick_lag [world.tick_lag].", "What fps do you want?") as null|num
			if(input != null)
				world.fps = input
		if("tick_lag")
			var/input = input(src, "Current is [world.tick_lag] with fps [world.fps].", "What tick_lag do you want?") as null|num
			if(input != null)
				world.tick_lag = input
		if(null)
			return
	world << "New FPS: [world.fps] tick_lag: [world.tick_lag]"

[WJohnston]

Imprecise movement only happens when you make the game too fast. I think sawu discovered a middle ground where the game feels smooth but the movement doesn't skip and extra tile. This is also much less of an issue now that we have a lot more control over stuff like space movement no longer RNG slipping us.