/// A tick modulator allows you to slow down operations by a percentage. /// /// Unfortunately, switching to floating point numbers for entities can induce floating point errors, slow down calculations /// and make the game less deterministic. This is why we use a speed modulator instead. /// Additionally, with small integers, lowering the speed by a percentage is not possible. For example, if we have a speed of 2, /// and we want to slow it down by 10%, we would need to slow it down by 0.2. However, since we are using integers, we can't. /// The only amount you can slow it down by is 1, which is 50% of the speed. /// /// The basic principle of the Speed Modulator is to instead 'skip' movement ticks every now and then. /// At 60 ticks per second, skips could happen several times per second, or once every few seconds. /// Whatever it be, as long as the tick rate is high enough, the human eye will not be able to tell the difference. /// /// For example, if we want to slow down the speed by 10%, we would need to skip every 10th tick. pub trait TickModulator { fn new(percent: f32) -> Self; fn next(&mut self) -> bool; } pub struct SimpleTickModulator { tick_count: u32, ticks_left: u32, } // TODO: Add tests // TODO: Look into average precision, binary code modulation strategy impl TickModulator for SimpleTickModulator { fn new(percent: f32) -> Self { let ticks_required: u32 = (1f32 / (1f32 - percent)).round() as u32; SimpleTickModulator { tick_count: ticks_required, ticks_left: ticks_required, } } fn next(&mut self) -> bool { self.ticks_left -= 1; // Return whether or not we should skip this tick if self.ticks_left == 0 { // We've reached the tick to skip, reset the counter self.ticks_left = self.tick_count; false } else { true } } }