Running at high TPS

[TheJamsh]

I'm currently running my versions of the game that I play offline or have unfinished mods installed at 30 TPS. I've got to say, the game is so damn smooth at this setting it feels laggy going back to 10 TPS for stock.

Is 30 TPS the highest setting available? I would suggest that stock actually starts running at 30 TPS from the next public beta, machines are probably more than capable of handling it, and the overall smoothness of gameplay and the more 'instant' more responsive feel of the craft and events in the game make it worthwhile.

Thoughts/comments?

(To those who dont know, TPS is "Turns Per Second", the amount of times the entirity of the code in BZ is executed per second.)

[Dataanti]

How do you even do something 30 times a second . do you just tap W while moving? If there was a option for it, it would be in gameprefs I would think. Other then that it might be something that is in the engine, like the poly count :S. I think 30 TPS is unnecessary for any game. would never be able to do that much things in such small amount of time XD. Also how can you tell what you TPS is?

... I'm still not even sure if you are talking about what I think you are talking about because 30 TPS is just to high I think.

[TheJamsh]

Lol, it doesn't work like that, you just play like normal, its just that the ships move smoother, the handling is smoother etc.

TPS is a commandline flag, for example "/tps 30". Stock is ALWAYS running at 10TPS. Try it out and you can feel the difference, its not much, but its noticeable. You will also notice that explosions happen almost instantly. For example when a vehicle mesh crashes into the ground, there is a short delay before the explosion plays through. At 30TPS this delay becomes smaller. .dll's will also run at the same speed, so .dll based things will seem more seamless.

When you do something like hold the 'W' key, the effect is not instant. One part of the BZ2 code basically checks "is the W key pressed? if yes, move ship forward". Of course its much more complex than this, the engine takes into account the physics of the craft, collisions etc. But the principle is the same.

Now, if you run this at one turn per second, your craft will 'jump' forward in one second intervals, and the delay between pressing the W key and the craft actually moving would be up to one second also, because the code hasn't reached that 'part' yet to check wether the W key is pressed. if you run at 30 tps, these delays are 300% smaller than running at 10 TPS.

However, it is only the object logic etc that runs at this speed, the particle system code, graphics code etc runs much faster.

[Zero Angel]

Are you saying that the TPS value also affects how frequently an input event (ie: button press) takes effect?

Ie: @10TPS a button press could take as long as 100ms (+normal processing latency) to register whereas at 30TPS it could take as long as 33ms (+normal processing latency)?

I tried adding /tps 30 to my bzone shortcut and havent experienced any hugely noticable effect but maybe more testing is in order. The framerate was quite smooth, by the way.

[GSH]

There are some weapons, some efx, etc that don't work well at 30tps. There were occasional reports of problems with XYZPDQ (not its real odf) on the old mantis database. And, things may work a little better in SP@30tps, but MP @30tps requires 3x the bandwidth, is 3x more sensitive to lost packets causing dropouts, etc.

I've got my hands full trying to reduce MP problems at stock settings. High tps is in the officially unsupported, use at your own risk, don't come whining if XYZPDQ is still broken.

-- GSH

[Clavin12]

It makes your service bay beep really fast.

[Nielk1]

It makes your service bay beep really fast.

Could collect all the current high TPS bugs and package them up for post pb6.1

[TheJamsh]

I havent tested it much, beyond looking at smoothness etc. MP sounds like hassle though...

[Zax]

I havent tested it much, beyond looking at smoothness etc. MP sounds like hassle though...

If all players have broadband set in options, triple bandwidth... =!, 10 TPS.

Sounds impossible though because this is an onload function..

[Clavin12]

It also changes the way it beeps when something is under attack.

[Nielk1]

All DLLs are now written to compensate for this. MP included.