Is the weight of the ragdolls tied to framerate?

[Kamamura]

Have been watching some PS4 videos, and while the ragdolls have some quirky moments, the characters do not fly around like they were made out of paper.

Anyone confirmed/refuted there is a problem? Seems to me that combat is too easy now - one "soccer" kick sends everyone flying, while they all take a lot of damage.

[Virtua Sanus]

Yeah it has been confirmed that higher framerates make the ragdolls goofier. I am sure they are working on a fix.

Personally I love it, outside of the UFO Catcher being too hard now.

[Dan loeb]

Originally posted by Virtua Sanus:

Yeah it has been confirmed that higher framerates make the ragdolls goofier. I am sure they are working on a fix.

Personally I love it, outside of the UFO Catcher being too hard now.

I've had some absolutely amazing ragdolls, particularly while using bullet weapons. people just slide around slowly on the floor after being shot. this should be a feature, a goofy ragdolls checkbox tbh.

also, it's probably less about weight and more about how velocity, friction, and gravity calculations are done on them at higher framerates, which makes them appear as if they are quarter-weight, atleast at the frame rates i play at.

[Kamamura]

As an experiment, I have enabled SSAA anti aliasing, which cut my framerate to the 40-50 range. Strangely enough, most of the ragdoll problems are gone, they now appear much more "toned down", so I will probably play the game this way.

It's a damn shame, they have a brand new "dragon" engine... with the same old problems, probably as a result of poor programming practices.

[Arte]

Japanese devs are still very much in the console mindset. PC and thus variable framerates are not really a concept they worry about, as consoles are consistent across the board, so they get lazy and often tie a lot of stuff to framerates. Only recently are they considering PC a proper market, with Capcom being the first to officially acknowledge it.

It's bad that this physics tied to framerate issue exists but can't say I'm surprised.

[Dan loeb]

Originally posted by Kamamura:

As an experiment, I have enabled SSAA anti aliasing, which cut my framerate to the 40-50 range. Strangely enough, most of the ragdoll problems are gone, they now appear much more "toned down", so I will probably play the game this way.

It's a damn shame, they have a brand new "dragon" engine... with the same old problems, probably as a result of poor programming practices.

It's not so much poor, as it was the standard programming practice for years to ensure stability without needlessly complicating things on console games. high frame rate support in console ports is a very recent trend, kicked off by a surge in esports and high frame rate display adoption over the past 5 years. afaik, (nearly) every ps2 game tied physics to frame step. They opted to put the task on the CPU instead of vector unit 0 because VU0 is a pain to work with, and linked the physics event updates and checks to frame step.

[Dick Justice]

Physics being tied to framerate seems to be a recurring issue with certain PC versions of games. Witcher 3 had an issue where physics became less elaborate at 60fps compared to 30fps, same with Final Fantasy XV.

[Kamamura]

There is an interesting thread on topic on reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3aq9we/why_do_video_game_devs_tie_physics_to_framerate/

Still, I attribute the problem to the fact that current devs learnt in times when consoles provided uniform hardware platform with standardized gfx resolution and framerates. Today, most low level physics simulation or rendering is handled by libraries containing standardized solutions that evolved beyond these obsolete limitations.

The problem is that people often don't know about such tools, and if they do, they are not used to working with them, or still tend to do stuff "their way".

[Kippu-Kun]

So basically 30FPS (or 60, if the console can do it) is the framerate the developers originally intended, and anything above that threshold is only for a fringe market that only a small number of people even worry about. Things like this make me wary from getting a monitor above 60Hz or wider than 16:9.