[whatwg] Proposal: requestBackgroundProcessing()

[Ashley Gullen]

Isn't setTimeout also clamped to 1s in the background? This alone would add
so much latency as to effectively hang the game anyway.




On 20 February 2014 16:18, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 7:25 AM, Ashley Gullen <ashley at scirra.com> wrote:
> > We're building a browser-based P2P multiplayer engine on top of WebRTC
> > DataChannels. You can try out our work-in-progress here:
> > http://www.scirra.com/labs/multiplayer/test1/
> >
> > The first player in to a room is assigned the host, and all other
> > subsequently joining peers connect to the host with WebRTC DataChannels
> and
> > start exchanging game data. Like all responsible HTML5 games, it runs
> based
> > on a requestAnimationFrame loop.
>
> I think this is your problem.  rAF isn't a replacement for setTimeout,
> it's a variant designed to better solve the timer problem *when you
> want to be synced to the screen*.
>
> If you're doing network-management work, that has nothing to do with
> the screen refresh rate, and shouldn't be associated with it.  Just
> run a normal setTimeout loop instead.
>
> (If people used rAF for what it was *intended* for, we could probably
> have stopped firing it *entirely* when the window isn't visible.
> Instead, we had to compromise with the 1s refresh rate instead.)
>
> ~TJ
>