Our team has been having an issue (an issue that we also used to have in unity) where if our platformer game is running below 60fps, even the slightest bit, the scenery around the player (especially the foreground) would stutter and all surroundings would become quite unpleasant, if not painful to look at.
These videos highlight the issue and difference between our game running at 30fps and 60fps. We understand optimisation is required, but it would be great to still cater to lower range hardware that might not be able to run at 60fps.
Pay particular attention to the foreground rocks on the 30fps video and be sure to run the 60fps video at 60fps… otherwise it will look the same. We are yet to find any decent answer or documentation on this issue.
**You might also need to watch the 60fps the video a second time after it has fully buffered for it to run fully smoothly. Seems to be a few weird youtube jumps in footage the first play through.
60fps - - YouTube
30fps - - YouTube
Not sure if we are missing something massively obvious here, but it seems other games run fine and seemingly buttery smooth at 30fps. Any suggestions to get our game running smoother at 30fps or any framrate under 60fps would be great!
Hi LambCannon,
Looking at the videos you provided, I honestly cannot see a difference, but I do see a jitter in both. I’m normally a person who loves 60 fps over 30 fps, so this may just be a youtube thing. That aside, is it possible that your camera movement is in some way linked to the On Tick function? On Tick is a function that is called every frame, and can cause issues when frame rate dips or becomes uncapped. I doubt this is the issue as it actually looks as though your character is moving way more smoothly than the landscape, but it’s worth a mention.
Unfortunately youtube seems to reduce the issue on the 30fps vid and add some lag to the smooth 60fps vid.
Do you have any suggestions to move the camera independently of the player without using the On Tick function? We are having a great deal of trouble achieving a smooth result. Even with a static camera and the game running at 30fps the movement of the player is jittery.
The same thing also happens in the unreal engine platformer template when running it at 30fps with assets in the scene.
Thanks for the response. It’s been hard to find anything related to our issue online.
This may not produce the desired result, as I noticed you had the camera following behind the character a bit, but you could try setting the camera as a child of the character so that if the character moves, the camera will move the same distance from the camera’s current location. This is similar to how the default Side scroller works. Even if this isn’t the type of camera you want, you can at least see if the jittering is related to the way the camera is moving.
Unfortunately the jittering doesn’t seem to be restricted to the camera, as we used a static camera and the player moved jittery, but with the camera tracking the player the player’s motion seem smooth relative to the camera and the landscape seems jittery.
It seems to be that scrolling sideways at 30fps is just jittery. I’ve started testing other face-paced side scrollers today and it seems when running at 30fps they have a slight jitter, but nowhere near as extreme as ours can be.
Even the flying cam moving sideways in the UT4 demo makes the world jittery if you treat it like a platformer and have it running at 30fps. You wouldn’t notice anything like that playing in first person though.
It looks like there will always be a jitter, but it would be nice to reduce it for people running the game at a lower framerate. Some games with a more cluttered or detailed style seem to have less noticeable jitter probably because your eyes aren’t focusing on as many hard edges.
Would still love any more possible suggestions! Thanks again for the help.
If fps are ok, jitter is probably caused with movement code, did you apply DeltaTime to all deltas (values difference between frames) in tick and you are sure you apply it right?
Also the game looks nice 
Your 60 fps video looks smooth to me, while the 30 fps version is stuttering. But I don’t really get the actual question here. With v-sync, you will immediately drop to 30 fps if you can’t hold 60 (you knew that, of course).
30 fps will never look smooth, especially when combined with any horizontal camera movement and a full persistence display: Blur Busters TestUFO Motion Tests. Benchmark for monitors & displays.
That’s the reason, why SNES games like Super Mario World, Super Metroid or Donkey Kong Country were all running in 60 fps, as well as Sonic on Genesis Systems.
You could try to mask the stutter effect with some sort of motion blur, but that adds additional post processing cost.
PS: Your game looks great in 60 fps!
No issues with DeltaTime & Tick. Thanks for the suggestion though.
I Think has the right idea below.
There isn’t a huge amount of info of developers talking about this issue online but there are plenty of gamers out there who complain of either motion blur making the game hard to see, or the game being jittery.
Looks like optimising superbly will be key!
Also thanks for the compliment
This is the answer we needed but also something we hoped wasn’t the case.
We really couldn’t find a whole lot of developers talking about the issue of stuttering in a fast moving platformer/side scroller and simply wanted to know how old games got around this issue. It felt like we were missing out on some sort of secret way of making cameras move smoothly.
After a number of game and in engine tests we were starting to realise that it might just be the way things are.
Knowing that old games were running at 60fps and looking at that link you posted has cleared things up.
It turns out there are plenty of gamers out there who complain of either motion blur making the game hard to see, or the game being jittery.
Looks like optimisation will be key, plus maybe an optional motion blur option.
Thanks for your response! Also thanks for the compliment about the 60fps video!
You’re very welcome. 60 fps are hard, but the difference is really worth the effort. That’s why Mario, Donkey Kong and Super Meat Boy feel like they do and not like e. g. Little Big Planet or Sonic Generations (console version).
We ended up getting some nice results with a few scalability changes and getting rid of a few non-essential real-time features like ambient occlusion, adaptive lighting etc.
We are now getting high fps even with realtime lighting, and heading toward 30fps on the lowest settings on a gt630m which can barely run anything at 30fps.
It’s even looking a fair bit smoother with 30fps footage now: - YouTube
Thanks again for your help!
if this is the case, what to do to a side scroller game using event tick for perpetual movement?
That’s a 60 fps video (and it looks great!)