I understand the beauty of that game loop design, I'm really just wondering what's wrong with the way I'm trying to do it (where updating and rendering the scene is coupled)! If I can't sort this out, I can always switch to the version with fixed timestep for updating the scene but for now, if possible, I'd prefer to stay with the framerate independent updating and find out what is going wrong. Any further ideas?

EDIT: last_frame_tick, this_frame_tick and time look okay to me. last_frame_tick is 17619 after about 17 seconds, this_frame_tick in the same frame is 17745, time is 127.0f that frame. Next frame, last_frame_tick then is 17745 of course. This looks to be perfectly fine to me!

I understand the beauty of that game loop design, I'm really just wondering what's wrong with the way I'm trying to do it (where updating and rendering the scene is coupled)! If I can't sort this out, I can always switch to the version with fixed timestep for updating the scene but for now, if possible, I'd prefer to stay with the framerate independent updating and find out what is going wrong. Any further ideas?

I understand the beauty of that game loop design, I'm really just wondering what's wrong with the way I'm trying to do it (where updating and rendering the scene is coupled)! If I can't sort this out, I can always switch to the version with fixed timestep for updating the scene but for now, if possible, I'd prefer to stay with the framerate independent updating.