EffectLib

by Ter13
Handle generic temporary combat effects efficiently and cleanly

Improve tick handling

ID:2287752
 
Aug 26 2017, 9:55 pm
Applies to:Effectlib 2.2
Status: Open
Issue hasn't been assigned a status value.
Tick handling can be done a fair bit better. Ticks should be able to tick multiple times per frame if the tick separation is smaller than a single frame. They should also not happen immediately when the effect is added, but rather at a set interval along the effect's duration, with the final tick happening precisely at the end of the effect.

The following formulas should be used instead of the current assumption of reasonable tick separation values.

ceil(duration/tick_separation) //the number of ticks
duration / ticks //the actual separation between ticks
start_time + n/ticks * duration //the actual time that tick n should fire.
next_tick - world.time //the actual sleeping time for the current tick.


Provided next_tick-world.time is less than 1 world tick, multiple ticks will actually fire in a single frame, because sleep() rounds down to the nearest multiple of world.tick_lag.

Ticker effects should also save their calculated next_tick value, thus making their ticks more reliable when they are restored from a savefile, or backdated.

This also means that ticker effects should not rely on the end_time, but rather the tick counter for terminating the timer loop, unlike timer effects.