I see a lot of tutorial use the delta value when moving entities in their game. Personally, I feel like it’s a gimmick, so I am not using it in my game, and have not notices any negative impact on different types of PCs.
So my question is, what is the soul purpose of using delta values when moving entities?
The delta time is the time in seconds between frames. It ensures identical movement and speed regardless of how fast a computer can keep up. For example, if you’d want to move 5 units per second, you’d move 5 * deltaTime.
If X computer can run at 60 fps, then in the span of one second, it will execute 5 * 0.01667 60 times. If Y computer can run at only 10 fps, then it will execute 5 * 0.1 10 times. Both add up to 5 in the same time.
You’re right, it is a gimmick. Don’t use it.
Only use it when it has no side effects. Where it doesn’t change or affect anything. A pure function if you will. For example interpolation inside the render loop. Although for most games that won’t be necessary.
In theory yes, in practice no. What you should do instead to get consistency is to call the tick an extra time for each dropped frame.
So basically it’s like if the computer is unable to run the game at 60fps, we “jump” the characters to trick the human eye into smoothness. Wouldn’t that mess up collision detection?
yes it would mess up collision if kept unbounded, physics simulations often use fixed time steps to not allow any glitches of that kind.
if your delta values get too small or to big, numeric stability goes out of the window and everything breaks,
so you need to bound it.
If you add a very very small float value to a very big float value only the big value remains as the result because of limited precision and rounding.
in a game this results in a unit not moving at all if it is very slow.
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Don’t be Call of Duty.