time
"Brett Bibby" <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.games.devel.general |
|---|---|
| Organization | GameBrains |
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Howdy, I have been wrestling with time in my engine for some time now (no pun intended). I wondered how other people are handling time? Our game engine is specifically designed for PS2/Gcn, but it runs under Windows too. Specifically... What are the different components that people are using? We currently have a single 32-bit time variable initialized to zero at startup and that's it. Each frame we either count v-blanks, use system ticks/timers or OS facilities custom for each platform to increment the global time value, usually stored in microseconds and rounded up to millisecond resolution for use in the engine. Works well and I have done this for every game engine I have developed so far. Feels like a change may be warranted though as online gaming becomes more popular, since if the game was to run for many days it would overflow and timestamping may be problematic. So now I'm thinking of adding a time struct (different from ANSI C though) whereby we store the year, month, day, hour and minute, and second and also a conversion struct that says how many mins->hour->day->month->year so we can convert "real" time into game time. I can pack this into 64-bits, but then again a simple 64-bit timer using the old way to simply count ticks would also eliminate the overflow problem anyway and so I'm questioning the right thing to do. Also, I hoping to be able to use absolute time for certain things where we used to use delta times. What are people using for timestamps for online games? Does each game session reset the server session time to prevent eventual overflow? Or is a more robust timing mechanism used? Are people using microseconds? milliseconds? Thanks, Brett ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net is sponsored by: Speed Start Your Linux Apps Now. Build and deploy apps & Web services for Linux with a free DVD software kit from IBM. Click Now! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id56&alloc_id438&op=click _______________________________________________ Gamedevlists-general mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gamedevlists-general Archives: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_idU7