Blobula 0.8 and Decoupling the Physics

I'm working late into the nights to get Blobula done for the contest deadline. Last night I was spent going over a pretty infuriating topic: the physics frame rate. The basic concept (as I understand) is that a common problem in physics-based applications is that the timestep is tied to your general frame rate. Unfortunately, most games physics are built to support a particular frame rate (60 fps, 500 fps) and if your game suddenly does not meet that at any point well basically KAMBLO!

Blobula was suffering from this problem due the constant timestep I need for the verlet intergration technique I was using for the blob. In order to run properly, the physics needs to be update at around 700 fps in order to be smooth. I want to make a quick note that I want to lower this needed rate but that is going to require some more research time I don't have right now. So anyhoos, regardless of the framerate, we need to make sure the physics is updating as at a rate of 700 fps. So the conclusion came from an article that I found here. The funny thing about this article was that a long time ago during the months before I came to Full Sail, I sat down to start working on "My First Physics Demo." During that inexperienced time, I read this article and tried to apply it. I believe now that I had no idea what I was doing back then (and sometimes I'm afraid that is still true!). So once again, this article came back to help me and this time I was ready. Its amazing when this happens. It happened with my god-like collision book where I would read and have no clue, then come back months later and fully understand.

So the new version of Blobula is running with vysnc to lock it at 60 fps but the physics is running at roughly 700 fps. So check it out and give me some feedback!

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