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"Try passing a state object containing all the flags you need to keep track of that 30 or 60 frames a second." You can structure your data such that you only n

• dllthomas 12y ago
  Following up on this... With regards to the Pokemon example given, I can think of two good ways to encode it: First, simply a bunch of single-bit flags, one per move per competitor. Each turn, for move tracking, we update at most one bit in one of these arrays by copying the array and updating a pointer. We can track 1000+ moves, and only need to copy 128 bytes. You can do thousands of comparable things and still be done in a single frame. Second, a list of turn information. A move could ask arbitrary questions about the history of the current fight by walking the list. An append-only list trivially has an immutable sublist, and you only need to "pass" a single pointer. Walking the list should be trivially possible well inside a single frame, provided you don't have many thousands of turns in a single fight. All that leaves aside the fact that you don't actually need to fit your world updates in a single frame render - you can interpolate/extrapolate. This is especially easy in a turn-based game like Pokemon, where it mostly consists of "smoothly progress through the same animation".