Should I use float, double, or decimal for stats, position, etc?

Posted by Ryan Peschel on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by Ryan Peschel
Published on 2012-11-18T17:42:32Z Indexed on 2012/11/18 23:34 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 243

Filed under:

c#

|

floating-point

|

replays

The problem with float and double is that they are not exact. If you are to do something like store replays, the values would have to be exact.

The problems with decimal is that they are approximately 16x slower (confirmed by searching and personal testing) than floats and doubles.

Couldn't Vector2s be another problem because they use floats internally for all the components?

How do other games solve this problem? I'm sure they must use floats and doubles but aren't they not deterministic across platforms and different architecture?

The replay files for games like SC2 run in a linear fashion so you cannot skip ahead so how do they solve the determinism issue with floating point numbers?

© Game Development or respective owner

Related posts about c#

.NET WebRequest.PreAuthenticate not quite what it sounds like

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
I’ve run into the problem a few times now: How to pre-authenticate .NET WebRequest calls doing an HTTP call to the server – essentially send authentication credentials on the very first request instead of waiting for a server challenge first? At first glance this sound like it should be easy:… >>> More
HttpWebRequest and Ignoring SSL Certificate Errors

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
Man I can't believe this. I'm still mucking around with OFX servers and it drives me absolutely crazy how some these servers are just so unbelievably misconfigured. I've recently hit three different 3 major brokerages which fail HTTP validation with bad or corrupt certificates at least according to… >>> More
The dynamic Type in C# Simplifies COM Member Access from Visual FoxPro

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
I’ve written quite a bit about Visual FoxPro interoperating with .NET in the past both for ASP.NET interacting with Visual FoxPro COM objects as well as Visual FoxPro calling into .NET code via COM Interop. COM Interop with Visual FoxPro has a number of problems but one of them at least got a lot… >>> More
Dynamic Type to do away with Reflection

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
The dynamic type in C# 4.0 is a welcome addition to the language. One thing I’ve been doing a lot with it is to remove explicit Reflection code that’s often necessary when you ‘dynamically’ need to walk and object hierarchy. In the past I’ve had a number of ReflectionUtils that used string based expressions… >>> More
Finding a Relative Path in .NET

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
Here’s a nice and simple path utility that I’ve needed in a number of applications: I need to find a relative path based on a base path. So if I’m working in a folder called c:\temp\templates\ and I want to find a relative path for c:\temp\templates\subdir\test.txt I want to receive back subdir\test… >>> More

Related posts about floating-point

Comparing floating point values

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I just read a statement about the floating point value comparison Floating point values shall not be compared using either the == or != operators. Most floating point values have no exact binary representation and have a limited precision. If so what is the best method for comparing two floating… >>> More
understanding floating point variables

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
There is some problem, i can't understand anyway. look at this code please <script type="text/javascript"> function math(x) { var y; y = x*10; alert(y); } </script> <input type="button" onclick="math(0.011)"> What must be alerted after i click on button? i think 0.11… >>> More
floating point hex octal binary

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hi, I am working on a calculator that allows you to perform calculations past the decimal point in octal, hexadecimal, binary, and of course decimal. I am having trouble though finding a way to convert floating point decimal numbers to floating point hexadecimal, octal, binary and vice versa. The… >>> More
What is a Bias Value of Floating Point Numbers?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
In learning how floating point numbers are represented in computers I have come across the term "bias value" that I do not quite understand. The bias value in floating point numbers has to do with the negative and positiveness of the exponent part of a floating point number. The bias value of a… >>> More
Why are floating point values so prolific?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
So, title says it all. Why are floating point values so prolific in computer programming. Due to problems like rounding errors, and not being able to even accurately represent numbers such as 0.1, I really can't see how they got as far as they did. I understand that the computation is faster… >>> More