Way back in the day, every game had its logic tied to its framerate – As anyone who’s ever tried to run an eighties PC game on a nineties PC only to see it run at 20x speed and completely unplayable can tell you.

But in the modern day this is less common. Generally the game keeps chugging along at the same pace, no matter how fast or slow the frames are being presented (unless, of course, everything is bogged down so hard that even the game logic is struggling)

And yet, you’ll still find a few. Any fan of Dark Souls who played on PC back when Prepare to Die edition first came to PC will remember how unlocking the framerate could cause collision bugs and send you into the void. And I recently watched a video of a gent who massively overclocked a Nintendo Switch OLED and got Tears of the Kingdom to run at 60FPS… Except everything was, indeed, running in fast-forward, rather than just being smoother.

This makes me wonder – Is there some unseen advantage to keeping game logic and framerate tied together? Perhaps something that only really shows on weaker hardware? Or is it just devs going “well the hardware we’re targeting won’t really go over this speed, and we don’t really give a fuck about anything else” and not bothering to implement it?

  • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
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    3 months ago

    In Leisure Suit Larry this was deliberate. There was a puzzle where you needed to get Larry strong enough to open a grate or something. You could do that by doing a certain number of repetitions on a weight lifting thingy in a gym. The number of repetitions depended on the speed of your CPU. Of course the time for the animation per repetition stayed the same.

    Al Lowe wanted to punish those posh people with their fancy 3’86 machines. Funny joke back then. Nowadays it’s practically impossible. I wonder what they did with this puzzle in ScummVM.