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• What is the practical use of IBOs / degenerate vertex in OpenGL?

  - by 0xFAIL

  Vertices in 3D models CAN get cut in the process of optimizing 3D geometry, (degenerate vertices) by 3D graphics software (Blender, ...) when exporting because they aren't needed when reusing a vertex for multiple triangles. (In the current case 3D data is exported from Blender as .ply and read by a simple application that displays the 3D model) Every vertex has a few attributes like position, color, normal, tangent,... But the data for each vertex that is cut through the vertex sharing is lost and is missing in the vertex shader. Modern shader techniques like Bump or Normal mapping require normals/tangents per vertex which are also cut. To use complex shader techniques IBOs must not be used? Or is there a way to use IBOs and retain the data per vertex that was origionally lost?

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• graphical interface when using assembly language

  - by Hellbent

  Im looking to use assembly language to make a great game, not just an average game but a really great game. I want to learn a framework to use in assembly. I know thats not possible without learning the framework in c first. So im thinking of learning sdl in c and then learn, teach myself, how to interpret the program and run it as assembly language code which shouldnt be that hard. Then i will have a window and some graphics routines to display the game while using assembly to code everything in. I need to spend some time learning sdl and then some more time learning how to code all those statements using assembly while calling c functions and knowing what registers returned calls use and what they leave etc. My question is , Is this a good way to go or is there something better to get a graphical window display using assembly language? Regards HellBent

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• Android: how do I switch between game scenes in a game? Any tutorials?

  - by Flavio

  I am trying to create a simple game using the Android SDK without using AndEngine (or any other game engine). I have plenty of experience designing games from the past, but I'm having lots of trouble trying to use the Android SDK to make my game. By far my biggest hurdle right now is switching between views. That is, for example, going from the menu to the first level, etc. I am using a traditional model I learned (I think it's called a scene stack or something?) in which you push the current scene onto a stack and the game's main loop runs the top item of the stack. This model seems non-trivial to implement in the Android SDK, mostly because Android seems to be picky about which thread instantiates which view. My issue is that I want the first level to show up when you press a button on the main menu, but when I instantiate the first level (the level class extends SurfaceView and implements SurfaceHolder.Callback) I get a runtime error complaining that the thread that runs the main menu can't instantiate this class. Something about calling Looper.prepare(). I figured at this point I was probably doing things wrong. I'm not sure how to specifically phrase my issue into a question, so maybe I should leave it as either 1) Does anybody know a good way (or the 'proper' way) to switch between scenes in an Android game? or 2) Are there any tutorials out there which show how to create a game that doesn't take place entirely in one scene? (I have googled for a while to no avail... maybe someone else knows of one?) Thanks!

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• Constrained/penalized distance function

  - by sigma.z.1980

  Assume a character is located on a n by n grid and has to reach a certain entry on that grid. Its current position is (x1,y1). Also on the same grid is an enemy with coordinates (x2,y2). Each step algorithm randomly generates new candidate locations for the hero (if there are k candidates then there is a kx2 matrix of new potential locations. What I need is some distance objective function to compare the candidates. I'm currently using d1 - c * d2, where d1 is distance to the objective (measure in terms of number of pixels for each axis), d2 is distance to the enemy and c is some coefficient (this is very much like a set-up for Lagrangian). It's not working very well though. I'd be quite keen to learn how what constrained distance function are used for similar cases. Any suggestions are very much appreciated.

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• Adding 2D vector movement with rotation applied

  - by Michael Zehnich

  I am trying to apply a slight sine wave movement to objects that float around the screen to make them a little more interesting. I would like to apply this to the objects so that they oscillate from side to side, not front to back (so the oscillation does not affect their forward velocity). After reading various threads and tutorials, I have come to the conclusion that I need to create and add vectors, but I simply cannot come up with a solution that works. This is where I'm at right now, in the object's update method (updated based on comments): Vector2 oldPosition = new Vector2(spritePos.X, spritePos.Y); //note: newPosition is initially set in the constructor to spritePos.x/y Vector2 direction = newPosition - oldPosition; Vector2 perpendicular = new Vector2(direction.Y, -direction.X); perpendicular.Normalize(); sinePosAng += 0.1f; perpendicular.X += 2.5f * (float)Math.Sin(sinePosAng); spritePos.X += velocity * (float)Math.Cos(radians); spritePos.Y += velocity * (float)Math.Sin(radians); spritePos += perpendicular; newPosition = spritePos;

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• IDirect3DDevice9Ex and D3DPOOL_MANAGED?

  - by bluescrn

  So I wanted to switch to IDirect3DDevice9Ex, purely for the SetFrameLatency function, as fullscreen vsynced D3D seemed to produce noticable input lag. But then it tells me 'ha ha ha! now you can't use D3DPOOL_MANAGED!': Direct3D9: (ERROR) :D3DPOOL_MANAGED is not valid with IDirect3DDevice9Ex Is this really as unpleasant as it looks (when you're relying quite heavily on managed resources) - or is there a simple solution? If it really does mean manual management of everything (reloading all static textures, VBs, and IBs on a device reset), is it worth the hassle, will IDirect3DDevice9Ex bring enough benefit to make it worth writing a new resource manager? Starting to think I must be doing something wrong, due to this: Direct3D9: (ERROR) :Lock is not supported for textures allocated with POOL_DEFAULT unless they are marked D3DUSAGE_DYNAMIC. So if I put my (static) textures in POOL_DEFAULT, they need flagging as D3DUSAGE_DYNAMIC, just because I lock them once to load the data in?

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• Different ways to pass Textures into HLSL shaders

  - by codymanix

  The GraphicsDevice class of xna 4 has the properties Textures and VertexTextures. What is the exact difference? I don't really understand what MSDN tells me about this. I usually use Effect parameters to pass textures to my HLSL shaders. What are the differences between these methods, which is faster? My Scenario: I am working on a minecraft like game, which means lots of separate DrawPrimitives calls and change current Texture often since I have lots of different block types. Since I use an Octtree to organize the world, I cannot easily sort by texture.

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• Biome Transition in a Grid & Borderless World

  - by API-Beast

  I have a universe: a list of "Systems", each with their own center, type and radius. A small part of such a universe could look like this: Systems: Can be very close to a different system, e.g. overlap Can be inside another, much bigger system Can be very far away from any other systems Spawn system specific entities and particles inside the system radius Have some properties like background color So far so good. However, the player can fly around freely, inside and outside of systems, in real time. How do I interpolate and determine things like the background color now, depending on camera position? E.g. if you are halfway between a green and a red system you should see a background halfway between red and green, or if you are inside a lilac system near the center and at the border of a green system you should get a mostly lilac background etc.

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• Optimal Compression for Speech

  - by ashes999

  I'm designing a game that depends heavily on audio; I will have some 300+ speech files (most of them just a word or two long). This can very quickly escalate the size of my final game. What's the optimal way to encode/compress speech files to keep the size minimal without getting audio artifacts? Please address both per-file compression/encoding, and also zipping/compressing the set of all speech files together in your answer. Because I'm not sure which (or combination of both) factors will give me the best results. Edit: I need this to run in Silverlight and Android, so I'm presumably stuck with only MP3 as my option (other than uncompressed wave files).

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• What are cons of usage only non-member functions and POD?

  - by Miro

  I'm creating my own game engine. I've read these articles and this question about DOD and there was written to not use member functions and classes. I also heard some criticism to this idea. I can write it using member functions or non-member functions it would be similar. So what are benefits/cons of that approach or when project grows, does any of these approaches give clearer and better manageable code? With POD & non-member functions I don't have to make struct members public I can still use object id outside of engine like OpenGL does with all it's stuff, so It's not about encapsulation. POD - plain old data DOD - data oriented design

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• One True Event Loop

  - by CyberShadow

  Simple programs that collect data from only one system need only one event loop. For example, Windows applications have the message loop, POSIX network programs usually have a select/epoll/etc. loop at their core, pure SDL games use SDL's event loop. But what if you need to collect events from several subsystems? Such as an SDL game which doesn't use SDL_net for networking. I can think of several solutions: Polling (ugh) Put each event loop in its own thread, and: Send messages to the main thread, which collects and processes the events, or Place the event-processing code of each thread in a critical section, so that the threads can wait for events asynchronously but process them synchronously Choose one subsystem for the main event loop, and pass events from other subsystems via that subsystem as custom messages (for example, the Windows message loop and custom messages, or a socket select() loop and passing events via a loopback connection). Option 2.1 is more interesting on platforms where message-passing is a well-developed threading primitive (e.g. in the D programming language), but 2.2 looks like the best option to me.

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• How can I achieve strong typing with a component messaging system?

  - by Vaughan Hilts

  I'm looking at implementing a messaging system in my entity component system. I've deduced that I can use an event / queue for passing messages, but right now, I just use a generic object and cast out the data I want. I also considered using a dictionary. I see a lot of information on this, but they all involve a lot of casting and guessing. Is there any way to do this elegantly and keep strong typing on my messages?

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• How do they keep track of the NPCs in Left 4 Dead?

  - by f20k

  How do they keep track of the NPC zombies in Left 4 Dead? I am talking about the NPCs that just walk into walls or wander around aimlessly. Even though the players cannot see them, they are there (say inside rooms or behind doors). Let's say there's about 10 or so zombies in a hallway and inside rooms. Does the game keep all of those zombies in a list and iterate through giving them commands? Do they just spawn when the user is within a certain radius or reached a special location? Say you placed the 4 units (controlled by players) on completely different places throughout the map. Let's assume you aren't being swarmed and then you have not killed any of these aimless NPCs. Would the game be keeping track of 10 x 4 = 40 zombies in total? Or is my understanding completely off? The reason I ask is if I were to implement something similar on a mobile device, keeping track of 40 or more NPCs might not be such a great idea.

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• How to model interentity membership in entity-component architecture?

  - by croxis

  I'm falling in love with simple grace of entity-component design, although I still have issues breaking from MVC and OOP practices. Some of my game entities have membership relationships with each other (ex: a player is a member of a city, a city is a member of a nation), and I am unsure on the best way to implement it. My initial reaction is to have a a MemberOfCity component that points to the appropriate city component, but components are suppose to have no references to each other. My other option is to have a System do it, but that would require the system to persist data outside of a component. Is there a clean way to do this in an entity-component design, or am I trying to use a hammer on a screw and should use a hybrid/another approach?

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• Is 2 lines of push/pop code for each pre-draw-state too many?

  - by Griffin

  I'm trying to simplify vector graphics management in XNA; currently by incorporating state preservation. 2X lines of push/pop code for X states feels like too many, and it just feels wrong to have 2 lines of code that look identical except for one being push() and the other being pop(). The goal is to eradicate this repetitiveness,and I hoped to do so by creating an interface in which a client can give class/struct refs in which he wants restored after the rendering calls. Also note that many beginner-programmers will be using this, so forcing lambda expressions or other advanced C# features to be used in client code is not a good idea. I attempted to accomplish my goal by using Daniel Earwicker's Ptr class: public class Ptr<T> { Func<T> getter; Action<T> setter; public Ptr(Func<T> g, Action<T> s) { getter = g; setter = s; } public T Deref { get { return getter(); } set { setter(value); } } } an extension method: //doesn't work for structs since this is just syntatic sugar public static Ptr<T> GetPtr <T> (this T obj) { return new Ptr<T>( ()=> obj, v=> obj=v ); } and a Push Function: //returns a Pop Action for later calling public static Action Push <T> (ref T structure) where T: struct { T pushedValue = structure; //copies the struct data Ptr<T> p = structure.GetPtr(); return new Action( ()=> {p.Deref = pushedValue;} ); } However this doesn't work as stated in the code. How might I accomplish my goal? Example of code to be refactored: protected override void RenderLocally (GraphicsDevice device) { if (!(bool)isCompiled) {Compile();} //TODO: make sure state settings don't implicitly delete any buffers/resources RasterizerState oldRasterState = device.RasterizerState; DepthFormat oldFormat = device.PresentationParameters.DepthStencilFormat; DepthStencilState oldBufferState = device.DepthStencilState; { //Rendering code } device.RasterizerState = oldRasterState; device.DepthStencilState = oldBufferState; device.PresentationParameters.DepthStencilFormat = oldFormat; }

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• Any ideas on reducing lag in terrain generation?

  - by l5p4ngl312

  Ok so here's the deal. I've written an isometric engine that generates terrain based on camera values using 2D perlin noise. I planned on doing 3D but first I need to work out the lag issues I'm having. I will try to explain how I am doing this so that maybe someone can spot where I am going wrong. I know it should not be this laggy. There is the abstract class Block which right now just contains render(). BlockGrass, etc. extend this class and each has code in the render function to create a textured quad at the given position. Then there is the class Chunk which has the function Generate() and setBlocksInArea(). Generate uses 2D perlin noise to make a height map and stores the heights in a 2D array. It stores the positions of each block it generates in blockarray[x][y][z]. The chunks are 8x8x128. In the main game class there is a 3D array called blocksInArea. The blocks in this array are what gets rendered. When a chunk generates, it adds its blocks to this array at the correct index. It is like this so chunks can be saved to the hard drive (even though they aren't yet) but there can still be optimization with the rendering that you wouldn't have if you rendered each chunk separately. Here's where the laggy part comes in: When the camera moves to a new chunk, a row of chunks generates on the end of the axis that the camera moved on. But it still has to move the other chunks up/down in the blocksInArea (render) array. It does this by calculating the new position in the array and doing the Chunk.setBlocksInArea(): for(int x = 0; x < 8; x++){ for(int y = 0; y < 8; y++){ nx = x+(coordX - camCoordX)*8 ny = y+(coordY - camCoordY)*8 for(int z = 0; z < height[x][y]; z++){ blockarray[x][y][z] = Game.blocksInArea[nx][ny][z]; } } } My reasoning was that this would be much faster than doing the perlin noise all over again, but there are still little spikes of lag when you move in between chunks. Edit: Would it be possible to create a 3 dimensional array list so that shifting of chunks within the array would not be neccessary?

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• Any good web frameworks for asynchronous multiplayer games?

  - by Steven Stadnicki

  I'm trying to craft a site for web-based (original) board games, and my client (currently written in Actionscript, but that's highly fungible) works fine - I can play solitaire games in the client - but it has nothing to connect to. What I'm looking for is a server framework for handling accounts/authentication and game tracking: something that would let players log in, show them a list of their current games, let them invite friends to new games, let them make moves in the games they have open, etc. I'm flexible on language; obviously I'm going to have to write a lot of server code to handle the actual game logic, but that should be straightforward enough. I'm more concerned with how to handle the user (and game) DBs, though suggestions for a good server framework for communicating with the DBs (and serving up, most likely, JSON for client communications) are also welcome. Right now my leaning is towards Ruby (probably with Rails) but as far as I can determine it would be a pretty good chunk of effort to set up the necessary databases, so having something even higher-level would be really useful to me.

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• using heightmap to simulate 3d in an isometric 2d game

  - by VaTTeRGeR

  I saw a video of an 2.5d engine that used heightmaps to do zbuffering. Is this hard to do? I have more or less no idea of Opengl(lwjgl) and that stuff. I could imagine, that you compare each pixel and its depthmap to the depthmap of the already drawn background to determine if it gets drawn or not. Are there any tutorials on how to do this, is this a common problem? It would already be awesome if somebody knows the names of the Opengl commands so that i can go through some general tutorials on that. greets! Great 2.5d engine with the needed effect, pls go to the last 30 seconds Edit, just realised, that my question wasn't quite clear expressed: How can i tell Opengl to compare the existing depthbuffer with an grayscale texure, to determine if a pixel should get drawn or not?

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• Are there existing FOSS component-based frameworks?

  - by Tesserex

  The component based game programming paradigm is becoming much more popular. I was wondering, are there any projects out there that offer a reusable component framework? In any language, I guess I don't care about that. It's not for my own project, I'm just curious. Specifically I mean are there projects that include a base Entity class, a base Component class, and maybe some standard components? It would then be much easier starting a game if you didn't want to reinvent the wheel, or maybe you want a GraphicsComponent that does sprites with Direct3D, but you figure it's already been done a dozen times. A quick Googling turns up Rusher. Has anyone heard of this / does anyone use it? If there are no popular ones, then why not? Is it too difficult to make something like this reusable, and they need heavy customization? In my own implementation I found a lot of boilerplate that could be shoved into a framework.

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• Ray Intersecting Plane Formula in C++/DirectX

  - by user4585

  I'm developing a picking system that will use rays that intersect volumes and I'm having trouble with ray intersection versus a plane. I was able to figure out spheres fairly easily, but planes are giving me trouble. I've tried to understand various sources and get hung up on some of the variables used within their explanations. Here is a snippet of my code: bool Picking() { D3DXVECTOR3 vec; D3DXVECTOR3 vRayDir; D3DXVECTOR3 vRayOrig; D3DXVECTOR3 vROO, vROD; // vect ray obj orig, vec ray obj dir D3DXMATRIX m; D3DXMATRIX mInverse; D3DXMATRIX worldMat; // Obtain project matrix D3DXMATRIX pMatProj = CDirectXRenderer::GetInstance()->Director()->Proj(); // Obtain mouse position D3DXVECTOR3 pos = CGUIManager::GetInstance()->GUIObjectList.front().pos; // Get window width & height float w = CDirectXRenderer::GetInstance()->GetWidth(); float h = CDirectXRenderer::GetInstance()->GetHeight(); // Transform vector from screen to 3D space vec.x = (((2.0f * pos.x) / w) - 1.0f) / pMatProj._11; vec.y = -(((2.0f * pos.y) / h) - 1.0f) / pMatProj._22; vec.z = 1.0f; // Create a view inverse matrix D3DXMatrixInverse(&m, NULL, &CDirectXRenderer::GetInstance()->Director()->View()); // Determine our ray's direction vRayDir.x = vec.x * m._11 + vec.y * m._21 + vec.z * m._31; vRayDir.y = vec.x * m._12 + vec.y * m._22 + vec.z * m._32; vRayDir.z = vec.x * m._13 + vec.y * m._23 + vec.z * m._33; // Determine our ray's origin vRayOrig.x = m._41; vRayOrig.y = m._42; vRayOrig.z = m._43; D3DXMatrixIdentity(&worldMat); //worldMat = aliveActors[0]->GetTrans(); D3DXMatrixInverse(&mInverse, NULL, &worldMat); D3DXVec3TransformCoord(&vROO, &vRayOrig, &mInverse); D3DXVec3TransformNormal(&vROD, &vRayDir, &mInverse); D3DXVec3Normalize(&vROD, &vROD); When using this code I'm able to detect a ray intersection via a sphere, but I have questions when determining an intersection via a plane. First off should I be using my vRayOrig & vRayDir variables for the plane intersection tests or should I be using the new vectors that are created for use in object space? When looking at a site like this for example: http://www.tar.hu/gamealgorithms/ch22lev1sec2.html I'm curious as to what D is in the equation AX + BY + CZ + D = 0 and how does it factor in to determining a plane intersection? Any help will be appreciated, thanks.

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• Dynamic body implementation

  - by ArturoVM

  I am writing a 2D game where one of the characters has some very particular requirements. This character is a body with no particular shape (similar to a fluid, but not so much), it has to be able to grow and shrink (as in actually growing, not just scaling), and it has to have collision detection (even if it's basic). Because of this requirements, it obviously can't be based on a sprite, so direct rendering of the shape should be the logical thing to do. I assume this is no easy task, but I just couldn't find a good physics engine that covers these requirements (or at least no tutorial on how to do it; I particularly searched for Box2D tutorials). Is there a way of doing this with Box2D, SDL, or any other physics or game engine out there? If not, what's a good place to start? I am really clueless as far as soft-body physics are concerned.

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• Procedurally generated 2d terrain for side scroller on Sega Genesis hardware?

  - by DJCouchyCouch

  I'm working on the Sega Genesis that has a 8mhz Motorola 68000 CPU. Any ideas on how to generate fast and decent 2d tile terrain for a side scroller in real time? The game would generate new columns or rows depending on the direction the player is scrolling in. The generation would have to be deterministic. The same seed value would generate the same terrain. I'm looking for algorithms that would satisfy the memory and CPU constraints of the hardware.

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• Starting with text based MUD/MUCK game

  - by Scott Ivie

  I’ve had this idea for a video game in my head for a long time but I’ve never had the knowledge or time to get it done. I still don’t really, but I am willing to dedicate a chunk of my time to this before it’s too late. Recently I started studying Lua script for a program called “MUSH Client” which works for MU* telnet style text games. I want to use the GUI capabilities of Mush Client with a MU* server to create a basic game but here is my dilemma. I figured this could be a suitable starting place for me. BUT… Because I’m not very programmer savvy yet, I don’t know how to download/install/use the MU* server software. I was originally considering Protomuck because a few of the MU*s I were more impressed with began there. http://www.protomuck.org/ I downloaded it, but I guess I'm too used to GUI style programs so I'm having great difficulty figuring out what to do next. Does anyone have any suggestions? Does anyone even know what I'm talking about? heh..

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• User generated content: a basic yet simple to use OR a complex yet powerful solution?

  - by ne5tebiu

  As stated above, which solution is better for a game based on user generated content? The simple solution (in-game editor) is great for gamers without experience in coding and etc. In this way every player could populate the game with content. But the content would be very limited. The complex solution would allow the content to be with almost no limitation but casual gamers probably couldn't make hardly any content at all. If both solutions are used, the quality behind the second solution would be more valuable than the first solution's quantity. However, making a powerful in-game editor could even take more time and manpower than the actual game and every gamer would have to learn how to use the new complex tool, understand it, and master it if he or she wants to make quality content.

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• Scaling Sound Effects and Physics with Framerate

  - by Thomas Bradsworth

  (I'm using XNA and C#) Currently, my game (a shooter) runs flawlessly with 60 FPS (which I developed around). However, if the framerate is changed, there are two major problems: Gunshot sound effects are slower Jumping gets messed up Here's how I play gunshot sounds: update(gametime) { if(leftMouseButton.down) { enqueueBulletForSend(); playGunShot(); } } Now, obviously, the frequency of playGunShot depends on the framerate. I can easily fix the issue if the FPS is higher than 60 FPS by capping the shooting rate of the gun, but what if the FPS is less than 60? At first I thought to just loop and play more gunshots per frame, but I found that this can cause audio clipping or make the bullets fire in "clumps." Now for the second issue: Here's how jumping works in my game: if(jumpKey.Down && canJump) { velocity.Y += 0.224f; } // ... (other code) ... if(!onGround) velocity.Y += GRAVITY_ACCELERATION * elapsedSeconds; position += velocity; The issue here is that at < 60 FPS, the "intermediate" velocity is lost and therefore the character jumps lower. At 60 FPS, the game adds more "intermediate" velocities, and therefore the character jumps higher. For example, at 60 FPS, the following occurs: Velocity increased to 0.224 Not on ground, so velocity decreased by X Position increased by (0.224 - X) <-- this is the "intermediate" velocity At 30 FPS, the following occurs: Velocity increased to 0.224 Not on ground, so velocity decreased by 2X Position increased by (0.224 - 2X) <-- the "intermediate" velocity was lost All help is appreciated!

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