[games_access] Top 3 Top 3 and IGDA GASIG Awards Ceremony 2008

[Eelke Folmer]

Hi Reid,

On Dec 2, 2007, at 1:21 PM, Reid Kimball wrote:
>
> A solution could be slow motion play mode, but that also presents
> other problems. Using slow motion can impact the timing of scripted
> events and messages being sent and received by the internal game
> systems.

That's not true. Most games provide a synchronization mechanism  
independent of underlying hardware. Drawing/ AI / Physics all need to  
be  synchronized. AI / physics need to be deterministic and are  
executed exactly (n times per second).  Drawing is a bit more  
flexible but at preferably 60 fps missing a few frames is usually not  
a problem. Most games use a tick based timer mechanism (either using  
events or callbacks ).
E.g. if i want my game to run at 60fps I usually implement a timer  
mechanism that goes of every 1/60 second calls all the AI / Physics  
functions of my game handles player input and then calls draw.  
Guaranteed to run the same on any machine. This is how most games  
implement it. (assuming you have a single thread mechanism. For ps3/  
xbox360 you might want to bypass you OS to run your processes for AI  
or physics on a single core  but you would still synchronize them  
using a tick based mechanism, which effectively is already  
implemented in the PS3 pipeline ring-bus).  I can slow my game down  
by changing one variable in my game and it does not change any events  
or messages, it just changes the frequency with which things are  
handled and in the pinball example the speed with which the ball  
moves.. Network play is a different thing but that usually relies  
upon an asynchronous medium (like TCP/IP) anyway.

cheers eelke


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