As of Discovery 4.90 Part 2, the game includes a FPS cap set to 155 frames per second by default. This is to prevent unintentional jittering caused by having a frame rate higher than 155 frames per second, as the game's framerate is unfortunately not capped by default on Windows 10. Since the number of Windows 10 users is increasing as is our count of new players, the development team has decided to implement this functionality with a default setting of being enabled on all Windows 10 machines.

However, it has come to our attention that many players who were previously running their own FPS limiters are finding conflicts with the new Discovery FPS limiter. As we have anticipated this, there is an optional argument -noframelimit that you can pass in your Discovery Launcher's Optional Arguments field to disable the built-in limiter.


Please note that if you use the -noframelimit option to intentionally run without a framerate limiter, this can and will be considered a violation of rule 5.1:

Discovery Community Forum and Server Rules Wrote:5.1 Running the game with uncapped framerate that exceeds 155fps. Computers running uncapped framerate must use a third party program to limit the FPS to below 155. Tutorial.

Our intent was not to reinforce the idea that going over 155 FPS is considered cheating. The problem literally was, as stated, that Freelancer has no framerate limit on Windows 10 and as a result, anyone playing on Windows 10 that doesn't know the weird mechanics of this ancient busted game engine will be jittering.

This is an automatic, mechanical solution to a bug in the game engine that shows up on 46% of Windows machines out there. We added in a flag that lets "power users" disable the limiter in favour of their own preferred limiter tool because we wanted to make that available (also handy in case someone has some strange machine that Freelancer doesn't like being self-limited on, which is something we've now been made aware of and verified in one case).

Again, this isn't "stopping jittering cheaters". The fact we're telling the whole world how to turn the limiter off is proof of that. It's "removing unintentional jitter in 99+% of cases".

---