Jaerik said:
The original PlayStation II could only run at 29.4 FPS, so they decided to make that the baseline.
The problem is, the original coders were never told the game needed to run on other platforms. So they decided to use that 29.4 figure to hard-code a bunch of other stuff. The core timing mechanism of the entire client platform uses that 29.4 figure to do other stuff, like client-side timing of animations, recast timers, etc.
So, instead of having an animation and making it play at whatever speed they wanted, instead they hard-coded the animations such that they have exactly 29 frames for every second. This means you can't speed up the frame rate without also speeding up all the animations.
Worse, the recast timers on all spells, etc, relies on this 29.4 as the internal timer. That "You can't cast this again yet" check is client-side. If they boosted it, your spells would cool down faster, and make it look like you could cast them again. But when you tried, the server would send back an error saying you were trying to cast too fast, and likely hacking your client to do so. Same with things like movement speed.
In other words, the core system loop of the entire game is based around this 29 FPS, and it now cannot be raised without recoding the entire thing. And given that there are almost no server/client programmers left on the FFXI project in SE (only content folks and scripters), that isn't gunna happen.
The problem is, the original coders were never told the game needed to run on other platforms. So they decided to use that 29.4 figure to hard-code a bunch of other stuff. The core timing mechanism of the entire client platform uses that 29.4 figure to do other stuff, like client-side timing of animations, recast timers, etc.
So, instead of having an animation and making it play at whatever speed they wanted, instead they hard-coded the animations such that they have exactly 29 frames for every second. This means you can't speed up the frame rate without also speeding up all the animations.
Worse, the recast timers on all spells, etc, relies on this 29.4 as the internal timer. That "You can't cast this again yet" check is client-side. If they boosted it, your spells would cool down faster, and make it look like you could cast them again. But when you tried, the server would send back an error saying you were trying to cast too fast, and likely hacking your client to do so. Same with things like movement speed.
In other words, the core system loop of the entire game is based around this 29 FPS, and it now cannot be raised without recoding the entire thing. And given that there are almost no server/client programmers left on the FFXI project in SE (only content folks and scripters), that isn't gunna happen.
Hmmm, when you put it that way...
Recode the whole damn thing!
<.<
