Re:Idempotence now prevents pain later
by TeMPOraL on Friday April 09, 2021 @11:18AM
(#26751598)
> An interesting spin on realtime systems are computer games (...) Ponder that.
My younger self did that, quite a lot, thank you. I never felt comfortable with various approach of intermixing input handling, physics/game logic and rendering - whether to run them sequentially, decouple some or all of them, whether the physics should be "look-ahead" or "look-behind"... I ended up picking the pattern that leads to the most stable and deterministic behavior (look-behind physics in lockstep with input and on fixed update rate, rendering independent and done variable-rate), and stopped thinking about it.
So thanks for mentioning it in this context, it makes me more comfortable to hear from someone else that "now" in games is ill-defined on philosophical level, and I shouldn't have worried about it as much as I did.
My younger self did that, quite a lot, thank you. I never felt comfortable with various approach of intermixing input handling, physics/game logic and rendering - whether to run them sequentially, decouple some or all of them, whether the physics should be "look-ahead" or "look-behind"... I ended up picking the pattern that leads to the most stable and deterministic behavior (look-behind physics in lockstep with input and on fixed update rate, rendering independent and done variable-rate), and stopped thinking about it.
So thanks for mentioning it in this context, it makes me more comfortable to hear from someone else that "now" in games is ill-defined on philosophical level, and I shouldn't have worried about it as much as I did.