Question about an old PC game and framerate
8 years ago
Switzerland

Hi there. I'm from the community of Star Wars Episode I: Racer (currently two active runners ^^) and I'm looking for help about some technical stuff regarding the game. Maybe some of the PC runners here can help. This is the situation:

The newest runner of this game, JichiSenpai. plays on PC, which is far better than the N64 version I use. We don't directly compare the two versions for a number of reasons, like N64 having a slower way of starting boosts and of course lag. Our problem now is, that we found out that the framerate seems to affect the games physics in some ways. Unlike a lot of older PC games, this has nothing to do with very high framerates, instead, it's beneficial to play at 30 fps (the game normally caps at 60). Some skips are apparently easier that way.

So why is this a problem? Because there's no setting to play at a lower framerate, this can only be done with external tools. And I'm skeptical about allowing such tools for the leaderboard, so my question is: How do other PC communities handle situations like this?

There are two more things to consider:

  • This game never had any re-release, sadly, and the PC version is notoriously broken on modern systems. You're lucky if you can get it to work at all.
  • N64 actually has an advantage with its framerate (most N64 games run at around 20-30 fps and I doubt this one is much different)

Thanks for any help!

Jisti_007 likes this
Czech Republic

There's a similar issue with Tomb Raider: Anniversary when different (both high and low) framerate allows certain skips to work. We allow them for segmented runs, but not SS/RTA as you'd have to change the framerate on the fly via some 3rd party tool. AFAIK, SDA doesn't allow this either (they accepted a segmented run using different framerate though).

England

There isn't really much you can do. Some games tie AI logic, physics checks and other things to framerate. Whilst playing Lego Batman on my old computer there was certain things that would behave different for me than the other runner, because my game was running at 20fps. It's something all PC games have to deal with, and even some multi-generational games.

Switzerland

Sucks that there is no good solution to this. I'm leaning towards allowing it, it would just make things so much easier.

There are some PC games that allow similar things (doujin games mostly but I think a few others as well).

I think that allowing it is a good idea in general because it limits the influence that different PC setups have on the run and also makes it unnecessary to fiddle with the framerate during runs to increase consistency. This allows runs to be more directly comparable, both to runs on the same PC and runs on different ones. It also makes running the game a lot more enjoyable, as players don't have to worry as much about whether or not the game will decide to function properly during the run.

If your community agrees to allow the tool, I would suggest linking it in the game resources and mentioning it in the rules (along with the settings used).

Switzerland

That makes sense and seems to be the best approach :)