alt Hacker NewsThis is why delta time accumulator is preferred over using clocks, something like this would be best:
float accum = 0;
while (running) {
poll_input();
poll_network();
accum += delta_time;
while (accum >= tick_time) {
accum -= tick_time;
update_ui(tick_time);
update_anims(tick_time);
if (!paused) {
update_entities(tick_time);
}
}
render();
}Replies
usea • today at 12:28 PM
That's exactly how I do it. Makes the most sense to me.
AlienRobot • today at 2:33 PM
This gets bugged if it takes longer than one tick to run an iteration of game loop. Afaik the typical solution is to have a maximum number of iterations that you'll run and reset accum if it exceeds that.
the notion of using time directly in gamedev has always confused me; it feels like the correct answer should be to simply have a notion of turns, and a real-time game simply iterates over turns automatically. And then so many turns are executed per second
It's a simulation; why should clock time be involved to begin with? The only things that should care about clock time are those that exist outside the sim, e.g audio