Fixed Timestep

[BeeZee]

Hi Ray,

You mention in your book that there's a better way of handling the timestep available online at:

http://gafferongames.com/game-physics/f ... -timestep/

After poring over the link for a while, I can't figure out how to actually integrate it with Space Viking in place of the existing update method. Would you be able to show us how? It would be a fantastic learning opportunity. Thanks as always for your time!

[larry]

@BeeZee,
Have you compared the "before" and "after" of the Update routine? As they mention a lot of the strange behavior was fixed.

As I understand the routine, it's a matter of how you slice up time. How many intervals per fraction of time? The article would be updating the code from 12.25. But, I was pretty satisfied with 12.25 as I worked through the book.

[n_dubbs]

@larry is correct by specifying the time in which your update method is called, it will fix a lot of issues. The article just highlights the need to tweak how often your update method is called.

[BeeZee]

Thanks for the responses! I'm still very confused on how to implement a solution like what the linked article is proposing, though. The fixed time step provided in the book is below:

Code: Select all

static double UPDATE_INTERVAL = 1.0f/60.0f;
static double MAX_CYCLES_PER_FRAME = 5;
static double timeAccumulator = 0;

timeAccumulator += dt;
if (timeAccumulator > (MAX_CYCLES_PER_FRAME * UPDATE_INTERVAL)) {
    timeAccumulator = UPDATE_INTERVAL;
}
int32 velocityIterations = 3;
int32 positionIterations = 2;
while (timeAccumulator >= UPDATE_INTERVAL) {
    timeAccumulator -= UPDATE_INTERVAL;
    world->Step(UPDATE_INTERVAL,
        velocityIterations, positionIterations);
}

This seems easy enough to use. Right afterwards, however, it suggests:

There is one further optimization you can do to your physics loop: interpolate the results to remove the effects of that tiny extra slice of time in each frame. For more information on how to do this, check out http://gafferongames.com/game-physics/f ... -timestep/ or search the Cocos2D forums for a good discussion.

The linked article seems like a really interesting thing to explore, but its implementation is a lot more theoretical and is pretty far above the level of understanding I'm at after reading the book. There seem to be a lot of these discussions online, but all the ones I've been finding apply to different languages. Since the book makes mention of it, I think it would be awesome to dive in further and try to get it working with Cocos2D on iOS.

[BeeZee]

I found a really good implementation of this here, if anyone's interested:

http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forum/topic/8922

It wasn't too hard to get this running in place of the existing code. I'd be happy to help if anyone needs assistance figuring out how to use it.

[n_dubbs]

@BeeZee thanks for sharing!