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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Depends on what you mean by "limit user IO". Standard USB keyboards have a limit on the number of keys you can hold down at once but otherwise the limits are your physical speed rather than the protocol. Similarly, these techniques for fast clicking are still under what even the NES hardware is capable of; this rolling technique allows clicking buttons much more quickly than you normally can but they're still a long way from the 30Hz strobe the hardware itself will accept, as used by Tool Assisted Speedruns on real hardware. So even in the NES generation the "limits" were still far, far beyond human capabilities.

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>this rolling technique allows clicking buttons much more quickly than you normally can but they're still a long way from the 30Hz strobe the hardware itself will accept

This is actually false! Top players can actually roll faster than 30hz if they want; however, the game won't recognize this as all distinct inputs, so it really is the hardware that's limiting us. Check out this video to see how precise some players can be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K81CjNo4B_Q

(incidentally, i made a romhack of nes tetris that supports polling multiple times per frame, effectively removing this limit. i talk about it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9vKMNu5JWo)

>this rolling technique allows clicking buttons much more quickly than you normally can but they're still a long way from the 30Hz strobe the hardware itself will accept

That actually kind of what I was thinking of :-) . I would have though more "modern" games , particularly multiplayer, would have software limits even as the hardware got more capable.

Quite the contrary, actually. Some games check for inputs every frame, and computers nowadays can run modern games at up to hundreds of frames per second.

The simulation rate is often lower than the draw rate though. Minecraft is as low as 20 updates per second, while something like Counter Strike 2 handles events immediately and sends precise timestamps to the server, not discretized to any sampling rate beyond your hardware.

Nobody artificially limits input rates because that would reduce responsiveness. You can analyze a series of inputs to detect humanly-impossible changes.

Online multiplayer games are more likely have proper timers for all the ability cooldowns if anything to allow game designers to finetune the balance between various abilities. Otherwise they would be very quickly exploited by autoclickers (software and hardware). Although stuff like "rapid fire"/turbo buttons for console controllers with "100% UNDETECTABLE" in the marketing materials are very much a thing, so there are probably plenty of exceptions.

As for single player games there are barely any reasons for game developers to have improved in this regard over the years. "OnKeyDown" is still a standard API in many input libraries and the simplest thing to do is to have this mistake. Unless it's an ability with multiple second cooldown where the mistake would be obvious. And that's not unique to small games made by beginners or indie devs, AAA games have the same problems. Just few years ago DOOM Eternal had an exploit where mapping jump to a scrollwheel (even better if you have freely spinning scrolwheel), in combination with a few other quirks allowed you to do game breaking jumps skipping large parts of levels by quickly doing a bunch of them in a row and accumulating speed before game noticed that you are above ground and shouldn't be able to jump again. It was somewhat hot topic between speed runners of that game.

How about the Brick Game? And that game might be the most played game ever all over the world.

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