Re: Lua speed (was class implementation)

[Jamie Webb <j@...>]

On Tue, Apr 04, 2006 at 03:48:22PM -0700, Chris Marrin wrote:
> Kerry Thompson wrote:
> >...
> >Interesting. I can see from what you, David, and Chris wrote that singling
> >out 3D wasn't the best way to get my point across. Let me phrase it another
> >way: I wouldn't want to do a high-speed twitch game using Lua to do event
> >handling. Hard-core gamers can tell (and will complain) when a game takes
> >1/100th of a second to respond.
> 
> Hmmm. I've seen UI studies that show that humans can't discriminate 
> events that are less than 20ms (or 1/50th of a second) apart.

We may not be able to distinguish events that close together, but we
can certainly expect to time our actions to within 10ms. For example,
when returning a serve, a top tennis player must hit a ball moving at
something like 150km/h using a racquet with a 'sweet spot' maybe 10cm
in diameter. In 10ms, that ball has moved almost half a metre!

Given one racquet that somehow had even 1ms latency, and another that
didn't, I suspect our tennis pro could readily tell them apart, even
though he couldn't actually observe any difference.

Applying the same logic to games, a player may 'feel' a 10ms delay
even though his monitor may not refresh fast enough to have much chance
of actually seeing it.

-- Jamie Webb