Smooth Frames

A Space Engineers plugin that smooths motion to your monitor's refresh rate. Vanilla SE updates the world 60 times per second, so even on a 144 Hz, 240 Hz, or 360 Hz monitor, motion looks like 60 FPS — each render frame is a copy of the last sim tick until the next one lands. Smooth Frames interpolates the camera and nearby entities between sim ticks, so every render frame shows a distinct moment of motion. The engine's 120 FPS cap is also lifted, for users above that.

Install

1. Install Pulsar (link to installer in its README).
2. Enable Smooth Frames in the Plugins dialog.
3. Apply, restart the game.

Controls

• Ctrl+F11 — toggle interpolation on/off. Hot-togglable; the next render frame falls through to vanilla rendering when off, no transition needed.

Configuration

Open Pulsar's plugin list and click the settings cog next to Smooth Frames to bring up a dialog with:

• Interpolation enabled — checkbox, mirror of the Ctrl+F11 hotkey. Both sources persist to the same setting.
• Frame rate cap — slider, 60 Hz to your monitor's refresh rate. Rewrites the target frequency on the engine's render-thread frame-rate waiter so the renderer runs up to this many frames per second when the GPU has headroom. Defaults to your monitor's refresh.

Changes apply immediately and persist to %APPDATA%\SpaceEngineers\SmoothFrames.cfg.

Compatibility

Smooth Frames is a client-side rendering plugin only — it doesn't touch network state, so it works on any multiplayer server without the server having it installed, and can't cause desync.

It targets engine surfaces, not specific mods or plugins. Designed to work with mods built on Rich HUD Master and Text HUD API, and with plugins that hook into the billboard and camera systems.

How it works

Vanilla SE drives the camera at sim rate (60 Hz) and the renderer applies entity matrices from the latest sim tick verbatim — between ticks, the world is frozen. The plugin runs two patches around that loop:

• Sim thread — a postfix on MyCamera.UploadViewMatrixToRender snapshots the camera and the entities that need to stay in lockstep with it (held tool, piloted grid, local character, their subparts/children). The snapshot is published at the end of the tick, after the billboard swap-queue commit, so the render thread always sees a matched (camera, billboards) pair.
• Render thread — a postfix on MyRender11.ProcessMessageQueue computes alpha = (now − currTick) / dt, re-poses the camera at lerp(prev, curr, alpha) via MyRender11.SetupCameraMatrices, and re-poses each captured entity at lerp(prev_pose, curr_pose, alpha) through a synchronous PostponedUpdate bypass (the normal queued path lands one frame late and loses ordering to the sim thread's next per-tick message).

Around the camera/entity smoothing, a handful of subsystem patches keep the rest of the world in step: custom billboards (Build Info hairlines, depth-pulled lines), GPU particle effects (welder flame, tool sparks, drill dust, muzzle flash, and similar), unparented lights tied to a smoothed entity (character headlamp, welder/grinder contact glow), HUD markers (GPS labels, off-screen arrows), the block-placement preview, and the artificial horizon / crosshair.