Software Engineering and Computer Games

Updates per second

When you first run the Pop program, you will see the startup game Spacewar, which resembles an Asteroids game. Look at the Updates per second figure in the status bar at the bottom of the Pop window. The number is a rolling average, so it takes a few seconds for it to respond to changes, and the value will sometimes dance between two or three nearby numbers. The highest rate the Pop Framework allows is the speed of your graphics card’s updates per second; if you are at or near this rate the message will say ‘(Near Max).’ If you are in a mode where the program is running slower than the real time that it simulates, the message will say ‘(Slower than Real Time).’ Except in the ‘(Slower than Real Time)’ case, one second of simulated ...