Editing Frame

{{game icons|p=y|p2=y|p3=y|p4=y|hp=y|pb=y|pa=y}}
[[File:Frames demonstration.gif|thumb|An animation eight frames long that plays at two frames a second.]]
'''Frames''' are a series of consecutive images that, when played in rapid succession, give the illusion of movement.

Most screens refresh at a regular interval, usually 60 times per second, and the period when they are ready to receive a frame from the console is known as '''vertical blanking interval''' (VBI). For a game to display its current state, it must perform the following steps for each VBI
* Get the player's input.
* With the CPU, update the world state. The simulation is discrete (e.g. the position of a moving object is changed once per update), with a ''timestep'' that is an estimate of the time it takes to finish the frame.
* With the GPU, render the updated world state to a frame. (Because the CPU and GPU are working simultaneously, there is one frame of latency.)

If the console has to process a large amount of instructions, it may fail to do render the frame before the VBI: this forces the console to resend the previous frame (assuming vertical sync is enabled), causing lag. More complex games may aim to render a new frame every ''n'' VBIs, at the expense of fluidity and responsiveness, but maintaining consistency.

If the timestep of the simulation is static, then a frame can be considered as the primary unit of time. In [[tool-assisted superplay]]s, some tricks or [[glitch]]es are "frame-perfect", meaning that there is a one-frame window in which an outcome can happen. This makes them difficult or impossible to perform consistently in real time.

==Framerate==
The mainline ''Pikmin'' games contain complex areas and several objects, most notably, the [[Pikmin family|Pikmin]] themselves, with [[Pikmin limit|100]] of them being able to stay on-screen at once. Because of this, {{p1}}, {{p2}}, {{p3}} and {{p4}} target 30 frames per second, half of an ordinary screen's refresh rate (60 Hz).

The exception to this is the European [[region|version]] of ''Pikmin'' and ''Pikmin 2'':, if the game runs at the PAL 50 Hz frequency, the framerate is lowered to 25 frames per second. ''Pikmin''&#39;s physics timestep doesn't change, which causes the gameplay's speed to be slowed down by approximately 16.7% as a result, while on ''Pikmin 2'' it is adjusted so that the gameplay speed remains the same. The GameCube version of the first game only supports PAL 50 Hz, while its [[New Play Control! Pikmin|New Play Control version]] and both versions of ''Pikmin 2'' also support PAL 60 Hz.

Other than that, the [[main menu]]s of the first two games, and the [[options menu]], [[high scores menu]], [[bonuses menu]], and [[area selection menu]] in ''Pikmin 2'' all run at twice the framerate of the normal game.

Most modern games use the time it took to complete a frame as the timestep for the next frame, in order to keep the gameplay speed stable. However, the first three mainline games{{Citation needed|reason=Sure about 3. Uncertain about 1 and 2, especially since there are cheat codes to increase the framerate for both. 4 runs on Unreal Engine.}} do not dynamically adjust their timestep, which means that lag will also slow down the game. An example of this is the landing sequences in ''Pikmin 3'' on the [[Wii U]].

==See also==
*[[Challenge run]]
*[[Tool-assisted superplay]]
*[[Day]]
*[[Saved game]]

==External links==
*{{w|Frame rate|Wikipedia's article on frame rate}}

[[Category:Technical]]