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Technical Data

FRAMERATE

Alot of techniques are simple physics and geometry so think hard about that. All the laws of motion apply in D2. Framerate: otherwise known as frametime or FPS. This is a very key aspect of the Descent game engine. While playing type in the word FRAMETIME. You will notice a little counter pop up in the bottom right portion of your hud. This is basically the number of scenes of movement or "frames" your system is currently drawing to the screen each second. This determines two aspects of your game. The speed at which you fly and the rate of discharge from your weapons. Depending on your system and screen setup this can be as low as 10(way too low for proper game play) or as high as 1200(way too high to control.) The higher the fps the better generally speaking. But there should be a limit of the fps you allow. It really shouldn't be higher than 200fps. At this speed and higher your shooting so fast and moving so fast you either can't properly control your ship or your shooting so fast you might as well be hacked.

THE MYSTERY OF THE "60 FPS RULE" UNVEILED!

Many Descent pilots feel that 60 fps is ideal or that everyone should be running 60 fps to be fair. This is really a misconception for this reason: Your eyes have their own "Shutter speed" at which they percieve movement and light. In the physical world any movement that occurs at a rate of 60 times, cycles, rotations, or whatever per second is percieved by the eye as continuous or smooth, constant movement. To illustrate this imagine someone is flashing a strobe light in front you at 60 hertz or times per second. At this rate or higher it looks to you as if it's just continuous light with no interruptions. Now if you drop this rate to below 60hz or for the sake of our discussion, 60 frames per second, you can detect the pulsing of the light. It doesn't look continuous as if it was just switched on and not flashing.(This by the way is basically true with acoustics, sounds and our ears.) So with that in mind if a player was running 60 fps sure it would be smooth flying but it would be too slow for good Descent play.  But depending on your system your fps more than likely fluctuates between 40-80 or maybe more. So one second its smooth the next it's not. This makes your game look and seem sluggish at times even though you may not notice all the time. Personally I feel that 120 fps is closer to ideal that way no matter what the situation it would theoretically never drop below 60 fps. This also provides faster and more intense gameplay.

ADJUSTING FRAMERATE

So how do you change your framerate? Easier said than done. Changing screen sizes, hud types, your video card, processor speed, overclocking, bus speed and other things all contribute to a change in fps. You'll just have to fiddle with it. Some users have a video card with 3dx chipsets. There is a patch that allows you to use these cards properly with descent. Since with any other chipset(excluding s3 virge) your basically not using your cards 3d abilities. With 3dfx and a patched Descent file you can achieve a much higher framerate. The reason for this is because the patch rewrites the Descent engine to draw in 3d and at higher framerates(that info was taken directly from a parallax technician). But most users turn the 3dfx off to keep the fps down to 60 since with it enabled it can go sky high. From what I am told it actally stays rock solid at 60fps regardless of the situation. This is great for Descent play but too slow for my personal taste. You have to judge for yourself.