Timestepping

Hi, this is my first dev diary entry even though I've been working at Turborilla for a while now. I plan to make more frequent posts in the future and tell you about what I'm doing and get some thoughts on programming out there. Currently I'm working on a half-secret project so I can't say much about that just yet.

However, if you're a games programmer you might find this interesting. I've wanted to write that article for quite some time and now I finally got around to do it. It's been bugging me that no other article on timestepping talks enough about vertical synchronization.

Read our Timestepping Article

In shot it says that you should use a fixed time step and strive to enable vsync. Then it explains what you should think about when making your timestepping algorithm based on that goal. It covers the problem when vsync rate is different from the targeted framerate and the likely superflousness, lag and unevenness (frame time variation) of interpolated draws.

Don't worry if you didn't understand the paragraph above. The non-programmer version goes like this: It makes your game run smoother.