On the addition of new game-changing features in LR:C

My attempt at summarising the points of view

Spoiler:

This was my thread to try and filter down the arguments which were the original source of the debate. I don't know if it's of any use, but hey :-)

TheRevTastic wrote:I don't think you understand enough to know what will happen if something like that gets changes. I doubt you can change the frames before they are "interpolated".

It wouldn't involve "changing" any frames.

On the fps issue:
I'm a bit disturbed no one ever mentioned that there are two different "fps"'s we are talking about. One is the (non-realtime in this case) time-step that the physics use, the other controls the rate at which frames get rendered and displayed.
For example:
If the physics runs at 100 hz (100 time-steps per second) and the graphics runs at 10 hz (frames per second), the physics would be very accurate, but the actual playback would appear to be choppy.
If the physics runs at 10 hz and the graphics runs at 100 hz, the physics would be pretty inaccurate and funky, but the playback would appear amazingly smooth.

Physics and graphics are independent of each other. (except they both take up cpu so there needs to be compromises but that's only for major physics simulators)

In the case of Line Rider "running" at 60hz, it is the graphics that runs at 60hz, while the physics stays at 40hz. How the playback remains smooth is through INTERPOLATION as mentioned before, so even though the frame-rates don't seem to "match up," the computer will forcefully render it (rendering frames that are in between physics time-steps) to be smooth.

If the physics were to change to run at 60hz (ie changing the original physics engine), that would cause constants to change. Let's say the gravitational constant is 1 pixels per frame^2. Each frame is a time-step. If the frame-rate increase from 40hz to 60hz, that would cause the time-step to decrease from 0.025 to 0.0167 seconds, which causes the gravitational constant to increase, making gravity stronger. Though, it's actually not that hard to readjust them to replicate 40hz physics.
In addition, the general intuition we have for high precision track making would be thrown off (eg flings must be denser to work). I mean, it's not really that devastating if people are willing to accept it and relearn everything, but it would cause tracks made in the flash version to have completely no chance at being compatible with LR:C. Though I think the only reason why mhenr18 is sticking with 40fps is to simply to preserve the physics. I'm actually not sure.

Why exactly are we sticking with 40hz?

Mainly because it makes bugfixing a lot easier when I can share tracks between Unleashed and 6.2 and compare what's happening. Right now I think there's some odd order-of-operations things happening in Flash that are causing my fixed point translation to not behave the same as 6.2, so I'll have to spead out all the calculations in 6.2 and figure out what's actually happening. I also like a 40Hz timestep because it's not too low to make interpolation look weird (the distance between frames is small), while also being not too high to make reasonable 30fps output impossible.

As for rabid's 30fps thing, I personally don't see the appeal in slowing down the game. It wouldn't feel right. I'll be posting some footage within a week that demonstrates various framerates and speeds so people can get an idea for what I'm doing. The 30fps exports from this build will look pretty damn good though, they'll be far better than any editor can ever do.

I'm all for the new features, but I can understand (or at least, try to understand) people's qualms about new versions.

Art (and I'm sure most people will agree Line Rider is art, down to its core) is idea, form, and structure expressed in various fashions. Think of art, at its very basest form, as water, and the outlet through which this art is expressed the cup containing it. The cup can be paintings, it can be literature, it can be comics, and it can definitely be Line Rider. The quandary, it seems, arises over the fundamental changes in Line Rider. Many are uncomfortable because we are assigning the wrong label to a different cup.

The trick, then, is to not confuse the message with the messenger. I'm perfectly fine with the new "Line Rider" simply because I don't think of it as the Line Rider I've played for the past two years. Instead, I think of it as a new messenger, a new vessel for the same ideas, the same art. We're just going to find a new way to express it.

Peace.