Frameloop control

Searched the manuals but haven't found a way to lock the framerate at runtime.
I want my app to be running in the background and it doesn't need to sync with the vertical refresh (usually 60fps for LCD's) - I want to limit to say, 25-30 FPS.

How would I do this - or is it even possible?

thx
Shaun

 

There's this. Someone also had another way of doing it that doesn't involve busy-waiting (so it doesn't take up 100% CPU time), but I'm not sure where that is.

--Eric

 

Thanks guys - the key is using as little CPU as possible. Whenever I run this Unity app on my MacBookPro, my fans start spinning like crazy, it heats up and I generally feel uncomfortable to leave running it in the background (its drawing about 40% cpu avg, gpu - no idea)

Which brings up another point - what is actually paused when "RunInBackground' is set to false - do networking or other time critical commands still get processed?

Aras - where would one put the Thread.Sleep() statement? And wouldn't it mess with the behavioral processing? How about making this part of UnityEngine?

Shaun.

 

I can tell you that networking doesn't work when paused.

If you run a server that is paused, the game updates stop for everyone.

Because of that, I would assume it all halts.

-Jeremy

 

Just needed to solve the same issue--funny how that works :roll:

This will maintain constant framerate, and reduce cpu load. As for side effects, I don't know yet.

I just wrote this based on the busy waiting solution, but switched to sleep based on Aras's idea

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. using UnityEngine;
3. using System.Collections;
4. using System.Threading;
5.  
6.  
7.  
8.  
9. public class FpsClamp : MonoBehaviour {
10.     float oldTime = 0.0F;
11.     float theDeltaTime= 0.0F;
12.     float curTime= 0.0F;
13.     float timeTaken = 0.0F;
14.     int frameRate = 30;
15.    
16.     // Use this for initialization
17.     void Start () {
18.     theDeltaTime = (1.0F /frameRate);
19.     oldTime = Time.realtimeSinceStartup;
20.     }
21.    
22.    
23.     // Update is called once per frame
24.     void LateUpdate () {
25.     curTime = Time.realtimeSinceStartup;
26.     timeTaken = (curTime - oldTime);
27.     if(timeTaken < theDeltaTime){
28.         Thread.Sleep((int)(1000*(theDeltaTime - timeTaken)));
29.     }
30.    
31.    
32.     oldTime = Time.realtimeSinceStartup;
33.     }
34. }
35.  

 

Nice one - thanks Brian.

What would be good is to update the code so that the framerate is reduced to 1FPS when in the background - I guess that could be done with a combination RunInBackground and OnApplicationPause.