Continuous Time
A model of time that is smooth and unbroken, matching how time works in Real Life.
- Events in the world are typically clocked to real-world seconds. The game can express durations in seconds.
- Combat units typically act independantly, and actions are resolved simultaneously.
- There are typically no pauses during gameplay; time advances relentlessly just like wall time.
At some level, continuous time must be represented as some discrete value in computation hardware. However, the discrete intervals are so small that a human simply can’t tell the difference or take any particular advantage of the model. (For that matter, visual displays only update 60 - 240 times a second, the USB bus is polled at a certain frequency, network latency is typically in the 5ms - 50ms range for a good connection, etc. Nothing in our simulation of real time is actually continuous or instantaneous.)