Best approach for game animation?

Question

I have a course exercise in OpenGL to write a game with simple animation of a few objects

While discussing with my partner our design options we've realized we have two major choices for how the animation is going to work, Either

• Set a timer for a constant interval, say 30 msec, when the timer hits, calculate where objects should be and draw the frame. or -
• Don't use a timer, just a normal loop that runs all the time and in each iteration check how much time passed, calculate where the objects should be according to the interval and draw the frame.

What should generally be the preferred approach? Does anyone have concrete experience with either approach?

Answer 1

Option 2 is by far preferred. It will scale nicely across differently performing hardware.

The book "Game Programming Gems 1" had a chapter that covers exactly what you need:

Frame Rate Independent Linear Interpolation