When we clip the region that is only been redrawn, something
weird happens on Windows. When pushing 60 frames per second on a
60Hz monitor, it appears that the clipped region is often shown
of another frame, instead of the current.
Examples of this are:
- pause the game, move your mouse to the left, and at the right
speed it totally disappears.
- fast aircrafts seem to be in several places at once, weirdly
lagging behind.
- in title screen, moving your mouse gives you the idea it is
jumping places, instead of smooth movements.
In the end, if you do nothing, everything is correct, so it is
eventually consistent. Just when we are firing many BitBlt in
a clipped region, the in-between is not.
What goes wrong exactly, I honestly do not know. On every frame
that we push to the DC is a mouse painted, but visually it
sometimes appears like it is not. Recording with external software
shows it really is there.
It is also not our eyes playing tricks on us, as the first example
makes it really clear the mouse pointer really is not painted.
And to be clear, with the mouse this is easiest reproduceable,
as high-speed objects are influences by this most. But this happens
for all movement that redraws small regions.
Either way, not using clipped regions resolves the issue completely,
and there appears to be little to no penalty (I failed to measure
any impact of drawing the full screen). So better have a good game
than fast code, I guess?
When drawing an 8bpp screen buffer, palette resolving was done for each
dirty rectangle. In areas with high activity, this would mean a pixel might
have been resolved multiple times. Also, if too many individual updates
were queued, the whole screen would be refreshed, even if unnecessary.
All other drivers only keep one overall dirty rect, so do it here as well.
These were special settings only for the win32-drivers, and
introduced in the very first version we track.
Time kinda had caught up with those variables, so it is time to
say farewell.
force_full_redraw was most likely a debug functionality "in case
our dirty-rect fails". This should no longer be needed.
display_hz was cute, as it had a max of 120. That is kinda
out-dated information, but I also doubt anyone was really using
this.
WM_PAINT hits when-ever Windows feels like, but always after we
marked the screen as dirty. In result, it was lagging behind,
giving a sub-60fps experience.
With the new draw-tick there is no longer a need to be driven by
WM_PAINT, so it is better anyway to drive the drawing ourself. As
an added bonus this makes the win32 driver more like the others.
The higher your refresh-rate, the more likely this is. Mostly you
notice this when creating a new game or when abandoning a game.
This is a bit of a hack to keep the old behaviour, as before this
patch the game was already freezing your mouse while it was changing
game-mode, and it does this too after this patch. Just now it
freezes too a few frames earlier, to prevent not drawing windows
people still expect to see.
Most modern games run on 60 fps, and for good reason. This gives
a much smoother experiences.
As some people have monitors that can do 144Hz or even 240Hz, allow
people to configure the refresh rate. Of course, the higher you
set the value, the more time the game spends on drawing pixels
instead of simulating the game, which has an effect on simulation
speed.
The simulation will still always run at 33.33 fps, and is not
influences by this setting.
Sleep for 1ms (which is always (a lot) more than 1ms) is just
randomly guessing and hoping you hit your deadline, give or take.
But given we can calculate when our next frame is happening, we
can just sleep for that exact amount. As these values are often
a bit larger, it is also more likely the OS can schedule us back
in close to our requested target. This means it is more likely we
hit our deadlines, which makes the FPS a lot more stable.
Before, every next frame was calculated from the current time.
If for some reason the current frame was drifting a bit, the
next would too, and the next more, etc etc. This meant we rarely
hit the targets we would like, like 33.33fps.
Instead, allow video-drivers to drift slightly, and schedule the
next frame based on the time the last should have happened. Only
if the drift gets too much, that deadlines are missed for longer
period of times, schedule the next frame based on the current
time.
This makes the FPS a lot smoother, as sleeps aren't as exact as
you might think.
During fast-forward, the game was drawing as fast as it could. This
means that the fast-forward was limited also by how fast we could
draw, something that people in general don't expect.
To give an extreme case, if you are fully zoomed out on a busy
map, fast-forward would be mostly limited because of the time it
takes to draw the screen.
By decoupling the draw-tick and game-tick, we can keep the pace
of the draw-tick the same while speeding up the game-tick. To use
the extreme case as example again, if you are fully zoomed out
now, the screen only redraws 33.33 times per second, fast-forwarding
or not. This means fast-forward is much more likely to go at the
same speed, no matter what you are looking at.
_realtime_tick was reset every time the diff was calculated. This
means if it would trigger, say, every N.9 milliseconds, it would
after two iterations already drift a millisecond. This adds up
pretty quick.
On all OSes we tested the std::chrono::steady_clock is of a high
enough resolution to do millisecond measurements, which is all we
need.
By accident, this fixes a Win32 driver bug, where we would never
hit our targets, as the resolution of the clock was too low to
do accurate millisecond measurements with (it was ~16ms resolution
instead).
