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Comment by pfedor | Hacker News Reader

Why do the houses containing pigs shake ever so slightly at the beginning of each game play sequence?

I assumed that it's because the initial positions of the objects in the game are slightly off the equilibrium state, so when the physics is switched on they slump a little bit.

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It's to show you that the house is an object which can be moved/destroyed.

You're both right.

Probably true, but it would be trivial to run the physics loop a few times before rendering the first frame to remove the jitter. A neophyte developer would know how to do this and the folks at Rovio are pretty experienced. My vote is with conscious decision.

The idea must have been to avoid that extra second of wait. As long as I see the screen a second earlier I don't care if the pigs jittered a bit.

But they could probably run the physics loops for a few seconds and store the map layout after it has stabilized, not?

Not only that, but there is no reason that the physics loop would have to be run in real-time. They could just as easily run the physics loop for a few frames as fast as the hardware would let them with fixed deltas of average frame length (probably 1/30th of a sec). Chances are they could run half a second of simulation in just a few milliseconds without the need to render.

I gotta agree --- on one level (I forget which one) there is a golden egg wearing a hardhat... if you get the golden egg, that egg disappears. But when you restart the level and that egg is gone, the hardhat is still there, sitting in mid-air, as if the golden egg was there too. Then the physics turns on and the hat immediately falls to the ground. Pretty simple case of physics on, physics off.

I've even seen levels where every few times the level loads, if you wait 10-20 seconds, some part of the structure falls over on its own.

The physics feels so organic though that sometimes I shake my iphone in frustration as if that would help the structures fall faster in the game.

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