Writing Good Tick Limiters

Something I've seen in sooo many game tutorials at the start is that a lot of people are making a tick limiter much more difficult than it really should be. If you're not familiar with it, a tick limiter is used to limit the number of ticks per second so that the game runs the same speed on every device.

(All code is written in Java).

I see so many people do this:

long newTime = System.nanoTime();
long frameTime = newTime - currentTime;

currentTime = newTime;
accumulator += frameTime;

while (accumulator >= nanosPerLogicTick) {
    //tick and stuff
}

Or the even worse one:

int fps = 60;
double timePerTick = 1000000000 / fps;
double delta = 0;
long now;
long lastTime = System.nanoTime();
long timer = 0;
int ticks = 0;

while(running){
    now = System.nanoTime();
    delta += (now - lastTime) / timePerTick;
    timer += now - lastTime;
    lastTime = now;

    if(delta >= 1){
        //tick and stuff
        ticks++;
        delta--;
    }

    if(timer >= 1000000000){
        ticks = 0;
        timer = 0;
    }
}

Wow... doesn't that seem a little extra? Turns out in Java it's as simple as this:

(Global var containing last time)

private long lastTick = System.currentTimeMillis();

And finally, the if statement:

if (System.currentTimeMillis() - lastTick >= (1000 / 60)) {
    lastTick = System.currentTimeMillis();
    //tick and stuff
}

Hope this helps!

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Writing Good Tick Limiters

Matthew Bland

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