Pausing in the message loop

Hey,

I'm new to game programming. Actually OpenGL. I'm wondering if it is a bad idea to have a small pause (maybe 10 - 20 milliseconds) In the message loop. I guess is what I'm trying to do is slow the fps, and that is the only way I can think of. Is this supposed to be done a different way?

Thanks,
David

It would be a bad idea to pause in the message loop becuase you want to be able to read the inputs as quickly as possible to stop any lag.

As you add more things to your game the FPS concern will go down. You will eat them up fairly fast if you are not careful. You can tune your game to use a set FPS utilizing a bit of mathematics.

Why do you want to slow the FPS?

Adding a pause is not a bad idea, it will work fine, but what are you trying to achieve?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Bubba

As you add more things to your game the FPS concern will go down. You will eat them up fairly fast if you are not careful. You can tune your game to use a set FPS utilizing a bit of mathematics.

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Thanks Bubba, that makes sense.

Sang-drax, I have a real basic Open GL app and like Bubba is saying since there isn't much to process the fps is super high.

The fps will always be different on different machines, so it's a good idea to use the clock to make the timing in your game independent of the fps. This can be harder than it sounds, though, as my physics system will testify to.

Code:

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while (running)
{
    deltaTime = clock() - lastTime;
    lastTime = clock();
    object.position = object.position + object.velocity*deltaTime;
    draw(object);
}

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So if you use a clock you aren't guaranteed a constant frame rate, just that movement will occur at the same rate? Yeah I can see how that could get complicated. Thanks for the example, rainmanddw!