Hi Ken,
- So if a tick is a specified number of milliseconds then what happens
when too much is happening during a cycle for the computer to be able to handle in "tick" milliseconds?
The eToy system does not allow you to run any more ticks per second than it is able to update graphically. So if you request a thousand ticks per second and we only have an update rate of (say) 15 ticks per second you get 15 ticks per second.
- Or instead if the tick is in Squeak time units what relationship
does it have to the passage of time my watch shows?
A very vague relation ;-) Seriously, this is one of the things that we want to address via Croquet where the relation between "real time" and "simulation time" is defined in a different way. Right now one should think about ticks as "maximum ticks per second" not as "actual ticks per second".
Underlying my questions is the desire to be able to set a speed so that a car takes, for example, exactly 5 seconds to travel 100 units (pixels?) at a constant speed.
Strictly speaking, this isn't possible in eToys - there is simply no garantuee by the system that it will execute the scripts at precisely the speed you are indicating.
Cheers, - Andreas