Attempting to create a stable game engine loop

Question

I'm writing a fairly simple 2D multiplayer-over-network game. Right now, I find it nearly impossible for myself to create a stable loop. By stable I mean such kind of loop inside which certain calculations are done and which is repeated over strict periods of time (let's say, every 25 ms, that's what I'm fighting for right now). I haven't faced many severe hindrances this far except for this one.

In this game, several threads are running, both in server and client applications, assigned to various tasks. Let's take for example engine thread in my server application. In this thread, I try to create game loop using Thread.sleep, trying to take in account time taken by game calculations. Here's my loop, placed within run() method. Tick() function is payload of the loop. It simply contains ordered calls to other methods doing constant game updating.

long engFPS = 40;
long frameDur = 1000 / engFPS;
long lastFrameTime;
long nextFrame;

<...>

while(true)
{
    lastFrameTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
    nextFrame = lastFrameTime + frameDur;

    Tick();

    if(nextFrame - System.currentTimeMillis() > 0)
    {
        try
        {
            Thread.sleep(nextFrame - System.currentTimeMillis());
        }
        catch(Exception e)
        {
            System.err.println("TSEngine :: run :: " + e);
        }
    }
}

The major problem is that Thread.sleep just loves to betray your expectations about how much it will sleep. It can easily put thread to rest for much longer or much shorter time, especially on some machines with Windows XP (I've tested it myself, WinXP gives really nasty results compared to Win7 and other OS). I've poked around internets quite a lot, and result was disappointing. It seems to be fault of the thread scheduler of the OS we're running on, and its so-called granularity. As far as I understood, this scheduler constantly, over certain amount of time, checks demands of every thread in system, in particular, puts/awakes them from sleep. When re-checking time is low, like 1ms, things may seem smooth. Although, it is said that WinXP has granularity as high as 10 or 15 ms. I've also read that not only Java programmers, but those using other languages face this problem as well. Knowing this, it seems almost impossible to make a stable, sturdy, reliable game engine. Nevertheless, they're everywhere. I'm highly wondering by which means this problem can be fought or circumvented. Could someone more experienced give me a hint on this?

Answer 1

Don't rely on the OS or any timer mechanism to wake your thread or invoke some callback at a precise point in time or after a precise delay. It's just not going to happen.

The way to deal with this is instead of setting a sleep/callback/poll interval and then assuming that the interval is kept with a high degree of precision, keep track of the amount of time that has elapsed since the previous iteration and use that to determine what the current state should be. Pass this amount through to anything that updates state based upon the current "frame" (really you should design your engine in a way that the internal components don't know or care about anything as concrete as a frame; so that instead there is just state that moves fluidly through time, and when a new frame needs to be sent for rendering a snapshot of this state is used).

So for example, you might do:

long maxWorkingTimePerFrame = 1000 / FRAMES_PER_SECOND;  //this is optional
lastStartTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
while(true)
{
    long elapsedTime = System.currentTimeMillis() - lastStartTime;
    lastStartTime = System.currentTimeMillis();

    Tick(elapsedTime);

    //enforcing a maximum framerate here is optional...you don't need to sleep the thread
    long processingTimeForCurrentFrame = System.currentTimeMillis() - lastStartTime;
    if(processingTimeForCurrentFrame  < maxWorkingTimePerFrame)
    {
        try
        {
            Thread.sleep(maxWorkingTimePerFrame - processingTimeForCurrentFrame);
        }
        catch(Exception e)
        {
            System.err.println("TSEngine :: run :: " + e);
        }
    }
}

Also note that you can get greater timer granularity by using System.nanoTime() in place of System.currentTimeMillis().