what speed does rnd run in?

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Aurora
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what speed does rnd run in?

Post by Aurora »

so i've been playing the supaplex levelsets lately and the speed is making me wonder
usually supaplex runs in 35 fps but the "normal" option is way too fast for that whereas the "slow" mode feels just a teensy bit slower
does anybody know how many fps each option actually is?
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Holger
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Re: what speed does rnd run in?

Post by Holger »

You're right that the "normal" speed mode is faster than the original Supaplex speed on the classic PC (DOS) version, which was indeed 35 frames/s (whereas the R'n'D engine usually runs at 50 frames/s).

Let's have a look at the code in "src/screens.c":

Code: Select all

static struct
{
  int value;
  char *text;
} game_speeds_list[] =
{
#if 1
  {     30,     "Very Slow"                     },
  {     25,     "Slow"                          },
  {     20,     "Normal"                        },
  {     15,     "Fast"                          },
  {     10,     "Very Fast"                     },
#else
  {     1000,   "1/1s (Extremely Slow)"         },
  {     500,    "1/2s"                          },
  {     200,    "1/5s"                          },
  {     100,    "1/10s"                         },
  {     50,     "1/20s"                         },
  {     29,     "1/35s (Original Supaplex)"     },
  {     25,     "1/40s"                         },
  {     20,     "1/50s (Normal Speed)"          },
  {     14,     "1/70s (Maximum Supaplex)"      },
  {     10,     "1/100s"                        },
  {     5,      "1/200s"                        },
  {     2,      "1/500s"                        },
  {     1,      "1/1000s (Extremely Fast)"      },
#endif

  {     -1,     NULL                            },
};
As you can see, I've played around with a longer list of game speed options with a more "technical" notation than just "normal" or "very fast" (where the "technical" notation would of course be more useful for people who know what they are doing).

That second list (that isn't used) explicitly contains both Supaplex speeds -- the correct 35 fps speed and the wrong 70 fps speed (for which Herman Perk created the "speedfix" to correct the wrong (too fast) Supaplex speed on fast DOS PCs). As 35 fps correlates to a bit less than 29 ms frame delay, the "Very Slow" option would match the original Supaplex speed with a speed difference of around 1.5 ms per engine frame (effectively being around 5 % slower than the original Supaplex speed).
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Aurora
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Re: what speed does rnd run in?

Post by Aurora »

i've played a bit using the very slow mode, and it feels much slower than what i get on either supaplex or megaplex than 5%.
by contrast just slow feels the closest to the original speed.
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Holger
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Re: what speed does rnd run in?

Post by Holger »

i've played a bit using the very slow mode, and it feels much slower than what i get on either supaplex or megaplex than 5%.
If I remember correctly, also Megaplex runs faster than 35 frames by default (but can be changed to 35 fps, too).
by contrast just slow feels the closest to the original speed.
I've just started "dosbox" (DOS emulator) with the original "spfix63.exe", and indeed the playing speed of the original Supaplex game is practically the same speed as with the same Supaplex level in R'n'D (using the "Supaplex" game engine) with "very slow" speed (playing in parallel in both windows next to each others). Try for yourself! :-)

But of course every speed that works best for you is perfectly fine -- that's why I added the different speed options. :-)

P.S.: If you have a slow PC (especially with slow graphics), it might indeed be possible that R'n'D runs slower than it should (especially in fullscreen mode), while the old Supaplex in dosbox runs with normal speed, therefore being effectively faster than Supaplex in R'n'D. (For example, my own PC has no graphics card, and when playing in fullscreen mode, I indeed do not get 100% speed as it should be, but only in windowed mode.)
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Aurora
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Re: what speed does rnd run in?

Post by Aurora »

iirc megaplex has speed options ranging from 5 to around ~700 but it does run in 35 fps by default.
that said i did own a floppy disk copy of supaplex at one point, and using its speed as a point of comparison the normal "slow" mode matches up the closest, as do the standard settings for spfix/megaplex.
you might have a point about slower pc's though; i normally play on a laptop with 8 gb ram but still have to clean/defrag my c drive periodically \:
in any case thanks for the help!
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