[SDL] OpenGL + Timing

[Scott Harper]

Both of those are valid options, and I think neither have any clear- 
cut benefits over the other.  Another option you may want to consider  
is to have a second string running all the time (in the background) to  
process your objects at a constant framerate, and then your rendering  
thread either renders as fast as it can (you MAY end up with slightly  
choppy movement if your processing thread is significantly slower than  
your rendering thread); or you can put in a little extra work and have  
the rendering thread interpolate the points between graphical  
keyframes when determining where to draw your objects.  (Hopefully  
that made sense.  There's a really nice article out there that was  
written as an argument for this approach and explains it both better  
an in more detail than I just did.)

So basically, the choice is up to you.  All of the choices end up  
being useless if you go to low enough hardware specs, so whatever  
works well for being straightforward enough for you (depending on your  
experience making games) and working effectively for the game you're  
designing.  The separate process thread is most ideal for games where  
accurate jumping/timing is key to the experience/challenge of the  
game, for instance.  But if you're making a turn-based strategy (or  
even possibly a real-time strategy) game, then you may not need the  
exact precision gained by doing it such.

-- Scott

On Dec 26, 2007, at 12:16 PM, Jim Tink wrote:

> Hello all,
> I'm new to SDL and I've been through a lot of the tutorials listed on
> the tutorial page at libsdl.org.  But I'm having issues figuring out
> when to handle rendering. Should I use a SDL_AddTimer to add a timer
> function or should I use the delay function and render every 30 or so
> ms?
>
> Thanks for helping,
> Jim Tink
> _______________________________________________
> SDL mailing list
> SDL at lists.libsdl.org
> http://lists.libsdl.org/listinfo.cgi/sdl-libsdl.org