Software Engineering and Computer Games

7.5. Preserving your physics

As a rule, once you have a cCritter::move that gives you a visually convincing simulation of some reasonably accurate physics, you shouldn’t override it at all. If you ignore this rule, you run the risk of developing a game that runs great on your home machine, but which behaves badly when you bring the program in for a classroom demo – or, if you’re working alone, when you try and show it off at a conference or at a friend’s house. The critters may seem to be barely moving at all – or flying around the screen like neutrinos.

All the careful work in calculating a real time dt and passing it to your critters is going to make no difference if you make the cCritter::move(dt) method a virtual method and override it with ...