Time within the iso-CnC engine

Flag:	Time within the iso-CnC engine
File(s):	rules(md).ini
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This entry was copied from DeeZire's Red Alert 2 and Yuris Revenge INI Editing Guide for the sake of completeness. As it is not our intention to rip off DeeZire's work, this article is subject to a re-write and update with the latest community knowledge. For further information, please read Inclusion of The Guide.

Red Alert 2 measures time in any of three ways - minutes, seconds (or multiples of them) and frames. The first two are easy enough to figure out, but frames can be tricky. Time dependant variables measured in frames are usually those which depend on some other in game event and/or a graphical effect. Frames are used to ensure the game remains in sync and everything gets timed properly, and are measured by the number of frames per second (FPS) that the game is running at. This means that those events will run and happen quicker the faster the machine is that it is being run on - so in other words, if for example the Weather Storm was timed in frames, it would last an eternity on a slow machine and be over very quickly on a fast machine due to the difference in processor power. When minutes or seconds are used, it will still be timed correctly instead of running as slow as an older machine. As a general guide, I tend to estimate for an all-round average of 15 frames = 1 second - that appears to be the standard used throughout the game. You can measure the FPS of Red Alert 2 on your system by running the game in Multiplayer Debug Mode - do this by typing RA2.EXE -MPDEBUG on the command line (see the RA2.INI Guide for more details).