I am a computer hardware person and know little or nothing about programing. I have a laymans question about game programs. How is it that games like, Quake3 or UT, both of which were written around 1999, can have faster frame rates as 3D video cards improve in speed as time goes on? I am amazed at what I can see in my games today. I can see Missles coming right at me, and I can watch these same projectiles fly through the air as if they were doing this in real time. Yet these programs where written when frame rates where much slower. For example, I can remember the days when I had my Vodoo card, one could see the blast coming from the missle launcher and next the victom blowing up. You had little or no view of the missle flying through the air. How is it possible for these games to have faster frame rates when these faster frame rates where not written into these games in the first place back in 1999? Or is that part of the code and the way it is written? Is there a frame rate limit? Hope you can answer this for me at grade school level. Thanks.

Hi Larry.
If you want to start programming i suggest
you try reading Stephen Pratas book about
C++ programming. It learned me how to
program in C++ (wich most programmers use),
and its the best book about programming i
ever read. When you have learned C++ i suggest you buy "Tricks of the Windows Game-
Programming Gurus" by André LaMothe and others. Or you can try "Linux 3D Graphics
Programming", but i havent read that one yet
(im planning on buying it).
And it ameses me to how game-engines
can perform such inredible tasks.
Soldier Of Fortune 2 is driven by the Quake3
engine, and it runs on my computer deribly
bad despite that i decrease all the graphic-values to the point that the game looks like
something from -92. But UT2003 runs perfectly
even tough i set the graphics values a bit high (32-Bit, 1024x768, High Texture Resolotion). There are many reasons why games
run deffirently on different machines.
Some Video-Cards can handle some API´s
(OpenGL, SDL, DirectX etc)
very good, and some bad. And theres ofcourse
other stuff needed to be considered.
Level of detail of the models, physics,
shadows, other stuff (the GHOUL body physics
in SOF2 for example).
And theres also the fact that some
programmers program bad, some god.
Well actually bad isnt the right word,
making a kick-ass 3D-engine that looks good
AND can run high frame-rates on old machines
is very difficult. You have to find a good
technice that doesnt consume to much
CPU-time and doesnt have bad or buggy
world-physics for example.
I dont think theres is any real frame limit,
but i dont see why you have to have 250 FPS
in a game like civilazation.
A very irretating fenomena is that old games
often dont have a frame-rate limiter or dont move the objects in the world around based on real time but based on frames. On my
old P90 Suapaplex can run slow but on my
Duron 850Mhz Murphy races on in the world at
350 KM/H, as do the enemy´s!!!
Makeing a 3D-engine is quite a challange,
and i even if i knew it as well ass John
Carmack or Steve Pogle it would take a 800-
pages book to explain it all!!
I suggest you look at the books i mentioned
at Amazon and then contact me for a Compiler
(Compiler Devolopers are Evil!!! ).

"Compiler Devolopers are Evil!!!" - just like the posters who dont use spell checkers..
..

Back in the olden days, sometimes game writers would use CPU speed to control the rate of action in the game. Like Whiskey Bob says about Murphy racing around. Sometime try playing Ultima III on a machine with a CPU that is 1 GHz or more. My bet is that the little hurricane storm will be racing around so fast you won't even be able to see it, and you'll never be able to find a ship.

Game gurus took a clue from that, and they use hardware timer interrupts to control how fast the action happens. It doesn't matter how fast your machine is, your guy in DOOM II isn't going to run any faster. HOWEVER, if they did it right, they'll try to fit in as much graphic detail as possible between hardware interrupts. That means if you happen to get a machine that runs at 800 GHz sometime in the future, you should get even MORE frames in between those timer interrupts.

As to whether there is a frame limit or not, I'd say there probably is. However, they say after a frame rate of 30 or so, it gets hard for humans to tell a difference. Some of those older games could easily have higher fram rates than that.

Your computer will be doing two things independently;

1) Working out where everything is, based on hardware times, i.e. calculating where the missile is and its path.

2) Drawing everything you see as frames.

Basically when a frame is drawn it will check where your missile is and draw the missile and the whole screen. As soon as a frame has been drawn it will start drawing the next frame. The faster you PC is the faster it can draw frames thus the more times it checks where the missile is and the more times you see it at different parts of its journey.

Sorry, I know my spelling can be atroshus but I am also lazy and will not review my messages before I send them through. Yes I remember the really early games and how fast they could get but they also were not as smooth (sometimes even jerky if the processor got to fast) as todays games as the processors get faster and faster. Todays games seem to thrive on speed and that is why I asked if there was a limit for frame rate. Anyway, thanks for all of your help and feel free to write more info as this subject is very interesting. I will check into those books that #2 told me about.