3 ms·

He's alluding to frame buffers.

• blt 13y ago
  Do a lot of other objects read the "front" frame buffer besides the video output?
  • obviouslygreen 13y ago
    I think the whole point of a "front" framebuffer is that its only purpose is to be written to the screen. You're only ever writing to the back buffer, which is then flipped, at which point you're writing to a new buffer and it's the next frame. [edit: If I'm wrong... ouch. But it's been a while.]
  • blt 13y ago
    @obviouslygreen that is why "all of the objects just referenced a read only version of the world state" doesn't make sense to me as a frame buffer analogy...
    • xsmasher 13y ago
      It sounds like he's talking about double-buffering "model" data - like an array of all actors and their positions. You can't have one thread reading the data while another writes to it, but you can have the reading thread work on an "old" copy of the data while the writing thread modifies the live data. Games often want physics/model threads run with a consistent timestep, but have the rendering thread run as fast as possible.