there must be an advantage to tying a game's animation to its framerate
There is. Namely, you only have to compute the next game state when you've finished rendering the preceding frame, and that means you can do it all in a single thread. It also means you don't have to give much of a shit if you miss your target framerate -- you just lag for a few frames (i.e. framerate dips). If by some miracle your shitty code manages to go
above your target framerate, you can just block for a few milliseconds for time to "catch up."
Of course, this introduces no end of bugs and bad behaviors, and makes the game harder to play because input timing is unreliable and the game's response to inputs becomes unpredictable.
This was a somewhat-acceptable tradeoff during the 8-bit and 16-bit console eras when consoles just used the refresh rate of the TV screens they were connected to (60Hz for North America/NTSC and 50Hz for Europe/PAL) as the game clock. It was cheaper and easier than stuffing a dedicated clock into the hardware.
Once they hit 32-bit hardware though, they stopped that clock sync trickery and included real hardware clocks in the consoles. From that point on, tying game animations and logic to framerate is a sign of lazy and incompetent developers.
Skilled developers produce games like Factorio, where game state is managed on a separate thread and clock (targeting 60 UPS -- "Updates Per Second"), distinct from the renderer, which also targets 60 FPS but on a "best effort" basis. That is to say, even on weak-sauce video cards where the game struggles to run at 60 FPS, internally the game's state is still running at the same speed; it just doesn't look as smooth. This is crucial for a game like Factorio where behavior is expected to be deterministic and precise synchronization is essential for multiplayer to work right.
Single player campaign require continuous online connection.
View attachment 6506944
Wait, what? It downloads textures
every time they're needed? Is there a local cache? Doesn't that mean it's still consuming the same disk space after awhile once it's cached all the textures? WTF?
That sounds like an absolute pain in the dick to actually make it work anyway. Christ, just compress your fucking textures, idiots!
