💡 OPEN FEATURE: 144 Hz Gameplay

[Krishty]

TFXplorer gameplay/physics is currently calculated at 240 Hz, independent of graphics framerate.

This is a bit high for a flight sim – it is rather suited for racing simulators with constantly changing forces. One effect is drastically increased compute demand when lots of stuff happen on-screen.

People nowadays perceive 60 fps as smooth; VR requires 120 fps. High-end VR headsets go to 144 fps. I doubt that future humans have improved temporal resolution, so we shouldn’t go higher than that.

And we should do it before introducing replays/multiplayer/AI because these, to some degree, rely on gameplay frequency.

I’ll lower the physics rate to 144 Hz and observe if something breaks. Candidates are:

1. wheel simulation (wheel forces are a high-frequency especially with brakes)
2. view smoothing (Quaternion interpolation is a big TODO in my code)
3. ???

[Krishty]

… and exactly that it is.

Wheels are mostly fine, except for braking. The brakes are now muuuch more powerful than before.

View smoothing is implemented and feels great, but the screen goes blank if you set a breakpoint or hibernate the system for more than 30 seconds between two frames. It seems the pow(interpolation_speed, delta_t) call returns -inf instead of 0 for some reason (probably invalid overflow handling?) … I have to check how the function is specified for very large exponents.

[Krishty]

Fixed view interpolation; my expf() was wrong on overflow/underflow.

Will be in the next version, although I still need to figure out the wheel brakes.