I appreciate the concepts of delta time but do you really think its appropriate in a beginners class?
I would say that this concept is appropriate for a beginner’s class. Understanding how an object and/or its properties change over time is foundational to most types of programming. It is an incredibly useful concept that enables developers to understand dynamic programs.
As a small bit of constructive feedback, in the future you may find better support if you use titles that are more descriptive than “uh…”. Don’t get discouraged if some of these concepts are tricky to grasp at first. Nobody becomes an expert overnight, and don’t be afraid to ask for help. Clearly defining the problem you might be having will help the community answer your question .
I have been a huge fan of GameDev.tv and their courses. I started my game development journey with them using Unreal Engine 4 and then Unity. Now I am interested in Godot. This explanation of delta time has been a really great lesson on how it works. It’s absolutely detrimental to developing video games. Especially considering without knowledge of how it works you can’t guarantee that your game will run correctly on any machine that a user wants to play it on. Because computer’s aren’t like console’s there’s no guarantee that everyone has the same specs within their system. Using delta time correctly helps ensure that no matter what hardware a user has, the game will play the same.
I believe that this is paramount for a beginner. This is something that is fundamental to build on top of. The way it is explained is a little long winded, but ultimately this helps ensure consistent performance across various systems. Understanding delta timing allows you to know that your item will be going the same speed no matter the PC, or any other device that is used to play.
If the concept was difficult to grasp maybe this can help.
Previously when creating the speed as just a variable, and not applying *delta we were in the train of thought of just getting the player to move. This does work, and can be fine tuned for each system, but that would take a lot more work.
Instead we use delta timing in order to get an actual frame rate for an object or player to move.
This can be thought of in a mathematical sense. For example if the monitor is set to 60fps, and have a speed variable set to 10. It would look like this:
1060(1/60)
Where 1/60 is the delta timing because it is being updated 60 times per second. This means it would be moving at 600.0167 = 10.02 fps of movement speed.
I hope this helps. If not, or there is an error in my math please let me know.