Back to General and Gameplay Programming

Basic Game Loop

Jordan Singh · 2012-07-29T20:31:24

Hello there, I quickly developed this solution to developing a fixed time step for a server. (client is XNA so time step is already taken care of there). [source lang="csharp"] Stopwatch stopwatch = new Stopwatch(); float timer = (1f / 60f) * 1000000; while (true) { stopwatch.Reset(); stopwatch.Start(); //start update world //end update world Thread.Sleep(1); while (stopwatch.ElapsedTicks < timer) { } Console.WriteLine(stopwatch.ElapsedTicks); stopwatch.Stop(); }[/source] Its pretty basic, it sleeps for 1 millisecond to prevent 100% CPU usage (well really it sleeps for less than 15-16 milliseconds just because of the way Thread.Sleep works) then uses the stopwatch to see when its time to loop again. It does print out 16667 every cycle which is good, except for some times when it abnormaly printed out 32000+ (32 milliseconds). I am guessing this is due to the point of how Thread.Sleep works. The question is: is the code above good for a completely fixed time-step? should I also make use of winmm.dll (i think thats what it was called) for a more accurate fixed time step? Also id love to not use Thread.Sleep() but I just cant find another way, the server is console based. Replies are appriciated, Thanks!

General and Gameplay Programming Programming

Started by Xanather July 27, 2012 02:57 PM

11 comments, last by Inferiarum 11 years, 8 months ago

Firestryke31

350

July 29, 2012 02:21 AM

Throw in a Sleep() before/after render? Or if it's a server then instead of rendering.

Xanather

782

Author

July 29, 2012 01:06 PM

Darookie, never knew of that ManualResetEvent method (I need to dig into .net more lol), thanks I will try your method.

Firestryke, that seems like a alright idea (only because this is the server im talking about), even with using Thread.Sleep(x) I can make sure the world is updated 60 times a second with that code, once I finish developing the server I may attempt to use that idea and see how well it works aswell. Thanks