C# Simple 2d game - making the basic game loop

Question

Even though i have some experience in c#, this is my First game in C#. I am trying to set up the minimal skeleton of the game. I heard that Tick Event is a bad approarch for creating the main game loop.

This is the main concept of what I am trying to implement:

Program.cs

//Program.cs calls the Game Form.
Application.Run(new Game());

Game.cs

public partial class Game : Form
{
    int TotalFramesCount = 0;
    int TotalTimeElapsedInSeconds = 0;

    public Game()
    {
        InitializeComponent();
        GameStart();
    }

    public void GameStart()
    {
        GameInitialize();

        while(true)
        {                
            GameUpdate();                
            TotalFramesCount++;
            CalculateTotalTimeElapsedInSeconds();
            //Have a label to display FPS            
            label1.text = TotalFramesCount/TotalTimeElapsedInSeconds;
        }
    }

    private void GameInitialize()
    {
        //Initializes variables to create the First frame.
    } 

    private void GameUpdate()
    {
        // Creates the Next frame by making changes to the Previous frame 
        // depending on users inputs.           
    }     

    private void CalculateTotalTimeElapsedInSeconds()
    {
        // Calculates total time elapsed since program started
        // so that i can calculate the FPS.            
    }  

}

Now, this will not work because the while(true) loop blocks the Game Form from initializing. I found some solutions to this, by using System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(10); or Application.DoEvents();, but I didn't manage to make it work.

To explain why I want to implement this code here is an example of the above code in use:
Lets say I want my game to do the following:
Smoothly move a 100x100 Black colored Square from point (x1,y1) to (x2,y2) and backwards, in a loop and display the FPS in the label1 of the above code. With the above code in mind, I could possibly use TotalTimeElapsedInSeconds variable to set the speed of the movement to be relevant with the Time and not the Frames, as the Frames will differ on each machine.

// Example of fake code that moves a sqare on x axis with 20 pixels per second speed
private void GameUpdate()
{
int speed = 20;
MySquare.X = speed * TotalTimeElapsedInSeconds;
}

The reason i though of using a while(true) loop is that I will get the best FPS I can on each machine.

• How could I implement my idea on actual code ? (just the basic skeleton is what i am looking for)
• How could I set a max of, lets say 500 FPS to make the code "lighter" to run? instead of trying to produce as many frames as possible which I suspect will needlesly over-use the CPU(?)

Answer 1

Frame rate has nothing to do with smoothness. Even if you accomplish 500 frames/sec the movement will be choppy or worse. The trick is to synchronize with your monitor refresh rate. So for a monitor with 60Hz you need 60 frames/sec no more no less. You can't do that by using a loop in C#. You need DirectX or XNA. These frameworks can synchronize your drawings with the vertical scan of your monitor.

Answer 2

You need to make own thread to that while(true)-loop:

Thread thread = new Thread(new ThreadStart(GameStart));
thread.Priority = ThreadPriority.Lowest;
InitializeComponent();
thread.Start();

Check this blog post to get more coding intuition: https://praybook2.blogspot.com/2020/04/this-now-advanced-stuff.html

Tough it loop fast. There are many disadvantages by using the threads, consider using some ready built game engine --like Godot; where all these kinds of small problems are fixed beforehand, use threads only when they are needed.