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I believe I read somewhere that there is a technique which will make games appear more smooth than they are. I believe it is some visual trick, but I don't remember which one. (It is be something like "You percieve game to be more fluid if there is good shadows").

I may be wrong and there is no such thing.

Tetrad
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user712092
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4 Answers4

9

You're probably thinking of motion blur.

Edit for more content: Here's a bit from GPU Gems 3 on motion blur:

Motion Blur as a Post-Processing Effect

One of the best ways to simulate speed in a video game is to use motion blur. Motion blur can be one of the most important effects to add to games, especially racing games, because it increases realism and a sense of speed. Motion blur also helps smooth out a game's appearance, especially for games that render at 30 frames per second or less.

fospathi
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Tetrad
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    Omigawd look at the kitteh go fast! – Jonathan Connell Jun 14 '11 at 16:06
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    I absolutely hate motion blur. It is physically painful to try to track a heavily blurred object with my eyes. – AttackingHobo Jun 14 '11 at 16:25
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    This is almost definitely what the asker was thinking of; it's the only rendering technology which I've ever seen people claim as improving perceived smoothness. (Whether or not it actually works, I think, is still questionable. But the claim has been widely made.) – Trevor Powell Jun 14 '11 at 23:06
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    @AttackingHobo: I disagree... if done right and in small amounts, it greatly increases immersion (at least for me) but it does require extra processing power. So it is not a technique to make your game appear smoother for 'free' because it is running on low FPS due to hardware limitations – Samaursa Jun 15 '11 at 17:36
  • Maybe the way your visual system works is different than mine. But I can track really fast objects with my eyes. When tracking an object accurately, the apparent motion blur on the object should be around 0. – AttackingHobo Jun 15 '11 at 17:42
  • @Samaursa for example, on the highway its impossible to see the details of cars rims as they spin so fast they seem to blur? It will be blurry if you are looking right at it, but if you pass the focal point of your vision over the wheels at the same speed as one side of the wheel, you can make out the details. – AttackingHobo Jun 15 '11 at 18:38
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    @AttackingHobo: Well, that is when you are tracking the object with your eyes, and not spinning around. Try spinning around (in real life) and see how well you can track an object (our eyes still fixate, which is hard to emulate). Game should (maybe some do?) add a focal point where the blurring has no effect (and maybe increase its size artificially to allow for precision loss). Not sure how well that will work but I know they use it when you look down your iron-sights for example. Though I do agree, our brain is able to compensate for a lot of movement which cannot be translated to games. – Samaursa Jun 15 '11 at 18:44
  • @Samaursa if I spin my head 45 degrees extremely fast, I can still focus on a single point with ease. In a game if I do the same, and it has motion blur enabled on the turning, if I track something it will have the blur on there. And as I said, it is so disconcerting that it is physically painful for me. – AttackingHobo Jun 15 '11 at 18:48
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    @AttackingHobo: Yes, head movement :) not body movement. Anyway, it is a subjective topic, we can argue for hours. – Samaursa Jun 15 '11 at 18:53
  • How is it subjective? I am saying that humans can track objects with their eyes, and if they do so, the object will not be blurred. I am also saying that objects that are blurred in game cannot become unblurred when tracking them with your eyes. – AttackingHobo Jun 15 '11 at 19:14
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There is a way to allow updating at fixed rate, and rendering at whatever rate the users system can handle.

You need to implement a fixed time-step, which has the upside of making your game simulation determistic. And you need to implement interpolation in the drawing method, which will allow the drawing rate to be much higher than the updating rate, while looking really smooth.

Fixed time-step

Semi-fixed or Fully-fixed timestep?

Interpolation

How to Interpolate between two game states?

Community
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AttackingHobo
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3

Check out Real-time Frame Rate Up-conversion for Video Games, which was presented at Siggraph 2010.

msell
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    That looks absolutely horrible. Unless you are going for the effect of objects constantly warping the space and geometry behind them – AttackingHobo Jun 15 '11 at 19:18
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You can't really make the game overall appear faster than it is, but you can make slow parts look faster (or at any rate less noticeable) by de-coupling them from everything else so that everything else can run faster. Indeed, this is precisely why network commands are done asynchronously.

Similar things can be done locally, whenever one part of the game is slower than other parts. For example, physics updates are often run asynchronously from the rendering loop. Perhaps character animations are updated on a separate thread from background graphics, etc.

jhocking
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