As I'm certain anyone reading this thread is aware of, there's a long-standing theory in the VC:MP community that disabling your frame limiter or adjusting your FPS to a higher value causes players to warp for
whatever reason. Disabling frame limiter or using FPS hacks to circumvent the limit is oft considered a move comparable to cheating and has been considered ban-worthy if you were caught doing it.
On the topic of frame limiters, this happen earlier today in #VU:
<aXXo> Marcell adjust his FPS to a higher value every time he dies hhhhhhhhh
<[EAF]Alarba> deso was hacking
<[EAF]Alarba> 60fps
<Stormeus> What effect does having frame limiter disabled have on gameplay, though?
<Stormeus> oh no
<Stormeus> a high fps
<Stormeus> whatever shall we do with smooth gameplay
<Stormeus> I honestly want to see a video side-by-side comparison
<Stormeus> Of someone in VC:MP at 30fps
<Stormeus> And at 60fps
Though Deso wasn't adjusting his FPS, I was honestly curious as to whether or not VC:MP's sync caused disabling the frame limiter to cause any sort of distortion or irregularities in combat, so Shadows (heekzs) and I set off to record gameplay to compare different frame rates, the most important being the baseline of
30fps, a laggier
10fps, and a heightened
60fps.
From what I can tell from the videos I recorded, a player running VC:MP at 30fps would see no irregularities between someone playing at 30fps and another playing at 60fps. There was no observable warp that had not been caused by latency, and shooting seemed consistent.
These observations, on top of Charley's analysis on
running speed at different frame rates (which also found no measurable difference between 30fps and 60fps) leads me to believe that disabling your frame limiter has absolutely no substantial weight or advantage in gameplay, for several reasons:
Running speedAs mentioned above, players who play at 60fps move at the same speed that players at 30fps move at. Just because there are more frames being drawn in a 1-second interval does not mean that the game itself is running faster. It simply makes your view look much smoother while moving.
Combat and "warp"Combat animations are not interrupted and there is no warping or stuttering to players with latencies that differ by even a couple hundred milliseconds, even if one player has their frame limiter on and the other person has their frame limiter off, as shown in the video below.
It's my belief that any warp that actually is caused by disabling frame limiter is due to VC:MP sending more information in a one-second period about where the player is and what they're doing, since R2 does
not interpolate player movements, animations, and positions in an accurate manner, and simply warps them into place. Since the player is updating their position more frequently, this should actually make it easier to shoot them since the need for lead aim can be reduced by the player's frequent position updates.
Warp may also be caused by players attempting to perform various glitches while running with an increase frame rate, which either makes their glitches less effective as they are updating too frequently to give off the intended effect (see above) or does nothing other than giving the appearance of warping in place.
Network traffic and packet parsingBecause they are running at a higher frame rate, they also parse more incoming packets more frequently, meaning that as long as you're running at an acceptable frame rate with decent latency, combat becomes simpler as lead aim and glitching become less feasible.
Is this concrete? No, and on top of the fact that I'm taking an issue as trivial as whether or not disabling frame limiter affects how you shoot people in a video game seriously enough to write a paper on it is ridiculous in itself, but the idea here it should be something that is looked into more closely before banning people for "frame limiter hacks." (Which, honestly, sounds absolutely absurd in any context whatsoever.)