Towards a Reactive Game Engine
João Paulo Oliveira Marum, J. Adam Jones, H. Conrad Cunningham · 2019
Developing new ways to improve game engines and enabling the creation of more accurate experiences is an important issue, especially for real-time applications such as Virtual Reality. As this technology has evolved, the gap between rendered frames has become smaller and environments have become more complex. As a result, mistakes can arise with regard to order-dependent events. Often these mistakes result in a temporarily unstable state in the environment, and may not be visible because of the time lapse between rendered frames. These errors are compounded by events which are not directly driven by the game engine, such as user movement and input. There is a continuous interaction between the user and the environment and the precise actions that user may take often cannot be predicted a priori. Reactive programming is a still evolving paradigm that has been employed in many different applications such as robotics and user interfaces. Our research presents a reactive, dependency-based framework for game engines using associations between components to establish the order in which they update. Automated tests were developed to evaluate the framework and compare its performance to Unity3D's default update structure as well as an existing reactive programming framework.