A question regarding MSTS frame rates

Atlantic · Post by **Atlantic** » Wed May 12, 2004 8:41 pm

I read on the *****2004 forum that performance of that sim could be enhanced by capping the frame rates at 28 per second, as the wide variation in frame rates affects the smooth running of the sim and wondered if it is possible to cap the frame rates on MSTS, I have no idea how to go about this in either sim but I do notice on my old pc that it plods along at 10/12 fps rather like an old silent movie in a series of jerky but even movements, frame rates on my current pc vary from 58 to 2or 3 fps, depending on the scenic load, fine in open country but not in heavily detailed routes like Skipton. where the sim can pause for long periods before picking up or you get the dreaded send /dont send. Has anyone tried reducing frame rates, what were the results and how is it done.? I know the best answer is to upgrade but the purse strings cannot stretch that far at present.

saddletank · Post by **saddletank** » Wed May 12, 2004 8:58 pm

Not possible to cap or manually alter framerates that I know of. The pauses you might get at certain places on certain routes is due to the simulation unloading tile data from memory of the world tiles your train is leaving and loading new tile data in for the tiles your train is approaching, or pausing to load in an AI consist. It's just the way the code works and nothing you can do will eliminate that, although super fast hardware will reduce the pause, but you will need to spend lots of Â£Â£Â£ to get much of a reduction.

If the pausing or low fps is affecting your enjoyment of the game you can slide the graphics sliders over to the left a notch or two in the advanced graphics settings. Experiment with them one at a time to see which helps you most (I find turning off dynamic shadows and setting the world draw distance to 1500m helps quite a bit).

JohnKendrick · Post by **JohnKendrick** » Wed May 12, 2004 9:09 pm

Any frame rate over 16fps should look reasonably smooth - the old Standard 8 and 16mm silent movies ran at that speed and was acceptable. Super 8's 18fps was a little better but the difference was not really noticeable. It is worth mentioning that many cartoons were double framed, effectively meaning they had an effective fps of 12. MSTS is just about OK at that speed, though it tends to have the odd prolongued stutter at times, like it has stopped altogether! Whether MSTS runs at 60fps of 16 fps all should be well.

The stuttering can be caused by a variety of reasons (apart from a slow PC) namely dense route tiles full of complex objects where it helps if object builders keep the polygon count down to combat that - some do, some don't. Some objects have fully detailed interiors which cannot be seen from the exterior - what a waste of precious poly's ! Those unseen interior poly's should be deleted.

AI and static traffic when added to an activity can cause stuttering, particularly when MSTS launches a fresh AI service.

Pegging the frame rate to a max of 28fps wouldn't really achieve anything - that would vary on the power of the PC in any event - what would be nice if it didn't drop so low when loading a densely populated tile or AI traffic. I suspect if MS/Kuju could have balanced the frame rate out they would have done, but the old game engine was already getting past its sell by date!

John

Stooopidperson · Post by **Stooopidperson** » Thu May 13, 2004 2:15 pm

JohnKendrick wrote:Any frame rate over 16fps should look reasonably smooth - the old Standard 8 and 16mm silent movies ran at that speed and was acceptable. Super 8's 18fps was a little better but the difference was not really noticeable. It is worth mentioning that many cartoons were double framed, effectively meaning they had an effective fps of 12.

Aren't present day movies 25fps? 18fps still gives pauses. 24fps seems to be a lot smoother.

arabiandisco · Post by **arabiandisco** » Thu May 13, 2004 2:18 pm

It's no help at all, but I remember I used to be able to cap the frame rate in Quake 3... Though that was to more like 60! (no way you could get away with 20 odd FPS in quake...)

I thought present movies were 25fps, and the same with TV, too.

jimmyladd · Post by **jimmyladd** » Thu May 13, 2004 2:34 pm

It seems to me that as msts grows old and pc get quicker and cheeper in a couple of years time new pc's will be able to handle msts very well

JohnKendrick · Post by **JohnKendrick** » Thu May 13, 2004 8:10 pm

Sound movies were 24fps to give sufficient quality with optical sound. They are played at 25fps on TV to stop them flickering (which silent movies still do unles they are frame expanded by repeating some frames in the process!

But that doesn't help with MSTS frame rates unfortunately.

The trouble with MSTS is not so much frame rates at around 16fps but that it stalls momentarily while it loads. That has always been a problem with the MS operating system, it didn't happen with the Amiga though it was much slower than todays PCs. In those days, 10 years ago, a Windows PC couldn't even smooth scroll a screen saver. It still can't, but it is less obvious now!

Everything might stop while we have a cup of tea; a PC stops while it loads more data!

John

saddletank · Post by **saddletank** » Thu May 13, 2004 8:20 pm

jimmyladd wrote:It seems to me that as msts grows old and pc get quicker and cheeper in a couple of years time new pc's will be able to handle msts very well

Actually I don't think it will very much, due to the way the code is written and the way the sim works, it's at it's limit now and in the future MS will no doubt release an O/S that MSTS won't run on and that will be that.

I also feel that current super detailed routes are actually more than the sim can handle. Your hardware can handle it and at times is probably idle waiting for the sim to hand it the numbers to crunch...

JohnKendrick · Post by **JohnKendrick** » Thu May 13, 2004 8:38 pm

Yes I agree with that, MSTS seems to have been written with the assumptuion that no one will ever expand ram beyond 1998 levels! It rarely uses any more than 25% of the ram I have spare!

John

jimmyladd · Post by **jimmyladd** » Fri May 14, 2004 10:22 am

saddletank wrote:
jimmyladd wrote:It seems to me that as msts grows old and pc get quicker and cheeper in a couple of years time new pc's will be able to handle msts very well
Actually I don't think it will very much, due to the way the code is written and the way the sim works, it's at it's limit now and in the future MS will no doubt release an O/S that MSTS won't run on and that will be that.

I also feel that current super detailed routes are actually more than the sim can handle. Your hardware can handle it and at times is probably idle waiting for the sim to hand it the numbers to crunch...

What I ment is that as faster grafffics cards become cheaper, and the speed of hard drives goes up, the problems of slow frame rates on heavy tiles will become less of a problem. When I first had Cannock Chase version3 I had an Athlon 1.4MHz, 512mb of sdram, and a PCI graffics card, and I only could get a frame rate of 6fps out in the country. I then purchased a radeon 9200 256mb agp graffics card which upped the frame rates into the 20's and 30's except in heavyly populated tiles. I then built a new pc using an athlon barton 2800+ processor, the same graffics card, 512 mb 400ddr ram,120gb sata hard drive and now I never get a frame rate less than 12fps when on a heavyly populated tile, with lots of AI traffic and lots of static consists. Also I hardly get any sttutering when loading tiles. The only draw back is that that lot cost me over Â£370 In the future the price of faster components will become cheaper
Jim