Steady Ticking

Almost all video-games (and thereby game engines) have a common technique for iterating on the game process. The game is basically run in a loop. This loop is thereby called a game loop. On each iteration of this loop the game should prepare and actualize the state of the game for rendering and perform the graphics rendering itself. The time that it takes to process and render each frame this way is of course variable. You may suddenly have a computationally and/or graphically intensive frame, for example.

In order for the game logic to actualize the game state this variable delta time is usually passed to it to be able to “step” to this current frame from the previous one. This is implemented with a Tick event node and a Delta Seconds argument within Unreal Engine:

This technique is fine when you’re playing some kind of pre-baked animation where result