It's desirable for arcade games, which have fixed hardware including the display. There's no possibility of upgrading for better framerate, and the game can be designed so slowdown is rare or non-existent. Tying the physics to the framerate gives you very low and very consistent input latency with minimum developer effort.
Right, all valid points, but consider the scale of a game like those coming out of rockstar. I'd understand for indie games and arcade games, but a single player rpg that will likely never be seen in arcade settings? Seems odd to me to see it here. Rockstar has the resources to do it properly, one would think, no?
Suppose you don't care as much about replays, and you're willing to use other tricks to "cheat" on multiplayer sync instead (because most AAA titles seem to have multiplayer these days). Suppose, instead, your top priority is visual fidelity and being perceived as having cutting-edge graphics. You want maximum computational effort going into letting the gamers with a top-of-the-line GPU render on their 360FPS monitor. And you want lots of objects and realistic physics.
If you run physics on a global timer, you could run it at a slower rate and try to fake some of those frames (extrapolating intermediate positions of objects), which is complex. Or you could run it at a faster rate, and every frame has real physics updates, and then it's taking time you could be using for graphics or something else that you think sells better. And there are ways around that, too, but they're complicated and your team is busy and they aren't what your engine gives you for free...
>Lightgun games, for example, rely on very precise timing of the control input vs the CRT raster and simply do not work without a CRT.
Perhaps the most famous light gun game of all time (Duck Hunt on the NES), does not rely on especially precise timing. It draws one white rectangle per frame over each duck when you pull the trigger and checks if the Zapper can see it. LCD latency will probably still break this, but it's not like the later Super Scope for the SNES that actually does track the precise raster position. I expect it would be possible to patch the timing in software to make it work for a specific model of LCD. But even if you did this, the Zapper also includes a bandpass filter at the CRT horizontal retrace rate (about 15kHz) to better reject other light sources, so you'd need to mod it to bypass that, or mod the LCD to strobe the backlight at the right frequency.
It draws one white rectangle per frame over each duck when you pull the trigger and checks if the Zapper can see it
Almost, but not quite. First it blanks the entire screen to solid black and uses that to calibrate the black level of the gun, then it draws a white rectangle over one duck on one frame, then a white rectangle over the other duck on the next frame.
The NES could use this information to determine where the gun was pointing by firing an interrupt at the exact moment when the zapper’s photodiode reached a threshold brightness level above black, and then only register a hit if that occurred while the game was drawing the white rectangle. I think in reality the game didn’t care that much about the timing, only that a rising edge occurred after the fully black frame but before the return to a normal colour frame.
Either way, an LCD doesn’t work because it can’t transition full black to full white within a one frame window. It sometimes works in the 2 duck mode, but it usually records a hit on the wrong duck. In any case, it requires black to white latency less than 16ms
>or even outright wrong (see: transparency-layering effects on things like Sonic the Hedgehog)
If you're talking about the waterfalls, I'm not convinced blurring was necessary or intended. RGB support was rare in televisions in the USA, but it was common in PAL regions via a SCART cable, and the Mega Drive had native RGB output. Furthermore, the waterfalls are drawn as vertical lines, which I interpret as representing individual streams of water. If it was purely a pseudo-transparency effect it would make more sense to use a checkerboard pattern, e.g. as in the spotlight effect in Streets of Rage 2.
>No way would I have attempted that on a bike - the increased aerobic activity alone (to say nothing of embers / ashes / etc) would have probably caused crazy amounts of smoke inhalation / death.
Riding a bicycle while wearing an unpowered respirator/face mask is surprisingly easy, especially if it has an exhalation value. It does restrict breathing somewhat, but breathing isn't usually the bottleneck when you're cycling. This might even be the optimal way to escape a fire if the roads are congested.
Youtube doesn't implement a back function. A real back function would take you back to the same page you came from. If you click a video from the Youtube home page, then click the back button, Youtube will regenerate a different home page with different recommendations, losing the potentially interesting set of recommendations you saw before. You are forced to open every link in a new tab if you want true back functionality.
Double clicking is not a fix because it doubles latency, and more than doubles latency if you don't want to issue page loads that are immediately aborted. Long clicking is such a bizarre anti-feature that I never considered it might exist until I read about it in this HN discussion. Putting touchscreen-specific workarounds for lack of mouse buttons and modifier keys in a traditional GUI app is insanity.
"Spider and Web" is famous because it's a subversion of genre norms. It does not play fair by traditional text adventure game standards. I don't recommend it for beginners, because other than the central gimmick, the puzzles are not particularly interesting. You won't appreciate it unless you know how unusual it is.
And even if you do know how unusual it is, you won't necessarily like it. I can't go into detail without spoilers, but I can compare it to an analogous situation with the Fighting Fantasy gamebook "Creature of Havoc", which is, depending on your point of view, either a work of genius or a broken mess. You opinion of "Spider and Web" will likely match that of "Creature of Havoc".
That would happen in a free market, but software is intentionally not a free market thanks to copyright/patent laws. In software, lock-in effects dominate. People will continue using bad software because it's necessary to interoperate with bad software other people are using. There's a coordination problem where everybody would be better off if they collectively switched to better software, but any individual is worse off if they're the first to switch.
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