One post tagged with "game-loop"

Every real-time strategy game is secretly a metronome. Thirty times a second the engine reads your inputs, advances the world one tick, and draws what happened. This week we finished dissecting that heartbeat across all three games we track — Tiberian Sun, Red Alert 2, and Yuri's Revenge — and then went one level deeper, into the bodies of the subsystems the tick calls, all the way down to the layer where the computer players decide what to build. Along the way the engine handed us a genuinely strange discovery: one virtual call that takes its arguments two different ways depending on which game you're playing.