Another examples of the screen refresh problem on the Mac?

Colin Holgate coiin at
Mon Oct 10 22:33:07 CDT 2011

I just tried some values, and it appears that the documentation is wrong. The example given of setting it to 12, makes you think that it's 12 frames per second. Saying that 20 is the default and that decreasing the rate will reduce CPU load, but may make things jerky, confirms that the help is talking in terms of frame per second.

But, if you try:

set the syncrate to 1000

you'll see that there is exactly one update of the Move movement per second.  Setting it to 100 give a convincing 10 fps.

In other words, the number is the amount of milliseconds between updates, and not the frames per second at all. Setting it to the default of 20 would give you 50 fps, which should be plenty smooth enough for anyone, especially if the company that used that default lives in a country that has PAL TV.

I believe that Mac OS and iOS have an effective fixed rate of 60 fps, so if you're using syncrate you may as well use 17 rather than 6.

In related news, there is a new iOS specific command, iphoneSetRedrawInterval. With that you can have LiveCode just do updates when iOS does them, which would be a bit like having a syncrate of 16.666, that is in sync with the system redraw.

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