17th November 2003, 5:15 PM
Quote:Yes, as in the case of Doom 3 where the developer made it so that it couldn't go over 60 fps. But that has nothing to do with animation. They did that to balance out the framerate with everything else, so that the game would always be pretty balanced in terms of graphics. You are not going to run any faster at 60 fps than you will at 30 fps. The only thing the better framerate changes is the smoothness of everything. Same thing goes for Oot. Go play the ROM that you have and make sure that you have the framerate counter on. Boot up the ROM and your N64 cart (or GC disc) and run around at the same time. You're not going to run any faster. The only change you will see is a higher resolution and smoother animations.
Resolution also isn't much of an issue for 3D games. Again, play some of your N64 ROMs and try them at different resolutions. With 2D games and voxel-based 3D games (Outcast), changing the resolution makes the games look weird, but that's not the case with most polygonal games.
I just have to disagree. About resolution... look, when you increase resolution everything shrinks. This is an objective and incontestible fact. So, in a top-down game, you can see farther if you do not adjust the art. That gives the person with the better computer a large advantage. What I was specifically referencing there was what Blizzard did with Warcraft III -- redid all the graphics for each resolution so that at all of them the sizes of everything would be the same, providing for increased quality and clarity at high resolutions without the unfairness inherent in the idea in many other games.
And as for framerate... well, I think all I need to do is mention my example of Moto Racer 2 again (and yes, that is a 3d game!) to show that changing framerates can definitely have unintended consequences... if you make a whole game designed for the controls to be at a specific speed and then suddenly they get twice as smooth you could majorly mess things up!