Smaller time unit than 1 tic

[Tormentor667]

It already happened several times to me now where I needed about 1/2 tic or 1/4 tic but couldn't achieve something like bthis because 1 tic is the smallest time unit available in DECORATE and ACS. So, any chance of getting the possibility to add something like...

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delay(0,2);

...or...

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BOSF A 0.1 A_FireCustomMissile("Bla", 0, 0, 0);

?

[CaptainToenail]

Yes I asked for this to, it got no'd because it can't be done apparently

[Graf Zahl]

A tic is the integral time unit of measurement in the game simulation. It can't be split.

[Ryan Cordell]

Would it require a heavy rewrite if less than a tic would be allowed (while still persevering that central time unit.) in the engine?

[Graf Zahl]

A tic *is* the smallest unit of measurement. It can't be broken up.

Don't even try to make suggestions. It's impossible to change this.

[Ryan Cordell]

So far I'm not finding any real sort of documentation on this "tic" unit (I at least know that 35 tics is at least a second, from what I've heard.), so I feel really skeptical about that. Honestly, I'm kind of calling bullshit on that one (milli, micro, nano, yoctoseconds anyone..?), sorry.

[esselfortium]

Blade Nightflame, in the Doom engine everything is calculated in tics. 35 tics occur per second, the same rate as the original game's framerate. ZDoom interpolates between those tics in order to render movement more smoothly, but it doesn't have any way that those tics could be broken up into smaller measurements.

[Ryan Cordell]

Alright then. I don't really need anything smaller - some clarification was just about enough since it feels pretty annoying even if it does have (albeit minimal) possibility.

[Zippy]

Just to be clear, a tic is not some official scientific unit. The actual duration of a tic is defined on a case by case basis. A tic, in a game (or really any simulation in general), is generally the smallest single unit of time. One iteration of the game/simulation loop, or one complete update to the game/simulation state is updated is often a single tic. When making Doom, id Software chose to make the tic 1/35 of a second, and this was coded as something fundamental in the basics of the engine (that's why vanilla Doom ran at 35 FPS, one screen refresh per tic). I can go off and make a game or simulation that has 15 tics in a second, or 40, or 125, or whatever I want. There is no actual value to a tic in general, only within certain contexts.

Basically, by the intended definition of what it is supposed to be, you can't subdivide a tic. As for ZDoom itself, I'm not in a position to be foretelling the ramifications of even just trying to change this, but suffice to say that Graf's declaration of it being basically impossible is more than sufficient for me, and really should be for anyone else.

[HotWax]

Of course, you could always modify the code yourself and make the tics process twice as fast...

Then have fun playing with your double-time version of Doom.

[Gez]

It's quite easy to do so since it's a preprocessor constant. So you've got only one value to change somewhere, and everything is (or at least, should be) updated.

But of course, don't expect it to still behave "like Doom should" since the simulation will be accelerated.

[randi]

I imagine the 35 Hz tic rate was chosen because exactly two video frames fit in that duration, as Doom's video mode was 70 Hz. Had computers of the time been faster, would they have used a 70 Hz tic instead?

This is just speculation on my part.

[edward850]

Seems possible. Wouldn't make the game somewhat smoother if it was?

[Gez]

Seems possible. Wouldn't make the game somewhat smoother if it was?

Of course.

But there are many parts of the engine that'd need to be changed to reflect a "minitic" that's just a fraction of the original tic.

[Tubers]

Seems possible. Wouldn't make the game somewhat smoother if it was?

Of course.

But there are many parts of the engine that'd need to be changed to reflect a "minitic" that's just a fraction of the original tic.

I don't think that is possible, if it was split it might cause problems.