A game that needs a screen cannot be measured#
SLOP2875 · Week 2
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120 s to play one run. 6 ms to run one.#
The claim#
You cannot measure a game whose rules are tangled up with its drawing code.
A run that needs a window, a frame clock and a person happens once every two minutes.
A run that needs none of them happens about twenty thousand times in the same two minutes.
All of Close Quarters is one function#
step(run, dt, input, rng)The state of a run. A slice of time. A direction. A source of random numbers.
No canvas. No clock.
Time is handed in#
A run is 7200 steps of 1/60 s.
Nothing waits for a real second to pass.
Randomness is handed in#
The same seed gives the same run.
Seed 97 ends at 69.333 s with 58 kills.
Every time, on the same kind of machine. On a Linux server: 63.1 s.
The player is handed in#
input is a direction.
It does not care whether a hand or a function produced it.
Week three is about that function.
Reading, weeks 1 and 2#
Mark J. Nelson, Game Metrics Without Players.
Everything you can learn about a game without anyone playing it.
Thursday#
One run of the specimen on your own machine, with no window open.
How long it took, in ms. How it ended.
Proof that the same seed ends the same way twice.
Everything else in this course is built on that gap#
120 s against 6 ms.
Week 2, in full#
The page for this week has the numbers and where they came from.