Where should I put my blanket to make it work accurately and consistently… Update or FixedUpdate? I have some issues.
Speaking of Update, I’ve been thinking about some of the differences between web programming and video game programming and how I am having to adjust my thinking moving from the former to the latter. One of the biggest ones differences to me is that web programming is, generally speaking, something that you can think about in a relatively linear fashion. At least, the way that I was doing it was. You have the code do X, and then it does Y, and then it does Z. Sure there are loops and this and that, but I rarely had any reason to have two functions running simultaneously. With video game programming, however, you kind of need to have a lot of stuff running simultaneously, and it isn’t always running in the same fashion either. Some stuff might be updating every frame, other stuff might be on a timer, other stuff executes based on context, etc. and all of it may be running at the same time. It’s not overly complicated to the point of confusion or anything, but it is definitely a departure from the way that I have been programming all of these years.
There is another difference too, not related to the code per se but to the interaction with the users. When you program for a website with hundreds of users, there is both immediate gratification and immediate stress involved when you finish a new feature and post it live. I can literally get an idea, execute it, put it live and have a bunch of users giving me feedback on it within the span of a couple of hours. I suppose this would be true in video game programming once you have a final product and are doing updates, but at the moment I’m mostly doing this stuff in a void, so I don’t get that immediate gratification of getting to show everyone what I’ve done and have people use it right away and tell me how awesome is is (lol?) and such. But, as stated above, I also don’t have the constant stress of wondering if the new stuff (or old stuff, for that matter) has bugs and, since it is now live, worrying about having to fix the bugs ASAP so as to keep the end user experience flowing nicely. So I guess there are pros and cons.