[…]
Now, actually, my tetris does need to draw every 50ms, because
it changes the colors of everything every 50ms (red=sin(t),
green=sin(t+2pi/3), blue=sin(t+4pi/3)). A framerate of 20fps is
sufficient for the drawing, but apparently not for my users.
Should I increase the framerate, which will only increase CPU
usage?
So why don’t you just handle the color changes like any other game
logic event, so that they cause video updates? You can only have one
rendering frame rate, but it’s not required to be constant or
locked to anything in particular. Just update whenever you need to -
which may include directly after receiving an input event.
[…]
As I understand it, libSDL keeps a thread for input of it’s own.
On most platforms, yes, AFAIK.
So, I would be interposing a thread between libSDL’s event thread
and my application’s thread that actually does stuff, a gratuitous
waste of system resources.
Yeah - but SDL doesn’t timestamp events, so if you need event input
timing to be more accurate than the logic and/or rendering frame rate
of your game, this is the only way. If you poll the event queue in
the same thread that does the rendering, your input timeline will get
"holes" of the size it takes to render one frame.
However, in most cases, this is not an issue. If the rendering frame
rate is so low that it could interferes with input, the game is
usually not playable anyway.
Another problem with multithreading is correctness.
Well, yeah - if you want your events timestamped, you have to pass
them to your main thread through a lock-free FIFO or something like
that… Quite trivial, actually. Either way, it’s still something you
most probably won’t need to do.
In Quake,
drawing is done as quickly as possible, churning out frames.
Except that the monitor refresh rate should limit the maximum frame
rate on proper setups.
The
logic is rather independent of the drawing, doing AI here and
noting that an explosion occurs over there, and informing the
drawing routine thereof. And input happens when it happens. I
don’t know if ID Software actually implemented Quake as a
multithreaded application, in fact, as it runs under MacOS, I
rather doubt that Quake is multithreaded.
I don’t know if it has separate logic and rendering threads, but I
strongly doubt it. If logic ran in a separate thread, the venom gun
in RTCW (which uses the Q3A engine) wouldn’t lose fire rate if the
rendering frame rate drops too low - but that’s exactly what happens.
(That is, RTCW doesn’t even handle progress of time properly in such
cases. Logic events are lost if the frame rate is too low.)
But it would make sense
to multithread it.
Not really; at least not considering what this thread is about. The
venom gun problem in RTCW is a bug, and fixing it wouldn’t require a
separate logic thread.
Kobo Deluxe uses only one thread for logic and rendering, and it still
plays correctly down to 1 Hz - though the game is obviously
unplayable at that frame rate, because you can’t see what’s going on,
and because input events are quantized to 1 Hz.
However, input, logic and drawing are not
asynchronous in Tetris. Nor are they asynchronous in Space
Invaders, PacMan, or a variety of other types of program.
Nope. And there’s no need for that, as those games just maintain a
sufficient frame rate to keep animation smoothness and input latency
at acceptable levels. You can do that by either updating at a
sufficient rate (could be fixed, or the highest possible rendering
rate), or by updating whenever something needs updating.
Which is why I think such an function is necessary to at least my
game’s logic, and why I think most APIs (UNIX, MacOS, 'doze, etc.)
include such a call.
I think the “proper” way would be to go completely event driven, and
just use SDL_WaitEvent(). Use timers to generate events for
"spontaneous" things like color cycling, animations and stuff. Using
timeouts to actually generate timing tends to be hairy, flaky and
inaccurate no matter how you implement it.
//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate
.- Audiality -----------------------------------------------.
| Free/Open Source audio engine for games and multimedia. |
| MIDI, modular synthesis, real time effects, scripting,… |
`-----------------------------------> http://audiality.org -’
— http://olofson.net — http://www.reologica.se —On Saturday 01 November 2003 20.12, tfolzdon at student.umass.edu wrote: