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ChuckandClaude Opus 5
a29c84208e
* fix(scroll): advance whole pixels per frame, not per wall-clock second Smooth motion is not a frame-rate property, and measuring it as one is why this survived three rounds of fixes. odds-ticker's frame timing is excellent -- 100.0 fps, 10.00ms median, 0% stalls, worst in-scroll frame 19.95ms -- and it still visibly stuttered. What the eye judges is whether the strip advances the same number of whole pixels on every presented frame. update_scroll_position derived position from scroll_speed * delta_time and get_visible_portion truncated it with int(), so jitter in delta_time decided which side of a pixel boundary the position landed on. The live windows show why that matters: a rock-steady 100.0 fps whose individual frames still range 5.6ms to 15.2ms, which at 100 px/s is 0.57px to 1.44px of movement. Run the measured frame times through the real helper and 5.8% of frames advance 0 or 2 pixels instead of 1 -- about six hitches a second. A frame that moves nothing followed by one that jumps two is exactly what micro-stutter looks like. It is worst at a crisp speed, which is the part that stings: at 100 px/s on a 100Hz panel the accumulator sits exactly on integer boundaries, so sub-millisecond jitter flips it either way and the motion beats at around 50Hz. Snapping to the crisp ladder fixes the average and the wall clock then throws away the per-frame uniformity the ladder was bought for. So when scroll_config snaps to a crisp speed it now also puts the helper in fixed-step mode: each presented frame advances exactly pixels_per_frame and no clock is consulted. 100% of frames move by the same amount, whatever the jitter. This is only correct because SwapOnVSync blocks until the panel has taken the frame, which makes the frame count a truer clock than time.time(). Before the swap was locked to vsync it would have run at whatever speed the loop spun at. Related: frame-based mode used to step discretely and was converted to elapsed-time accumulation earlier in this series, because its threshold comparison flipped on jitter. That was right for the code as it stood -- but it treated the symptom, replacing a broken discrete step with a smooth-looking accumulator instead of asking why a wall clock was involved at all. Non-crisp speeds keep pacing off time, and set_scroll_speed() clears the fixed step so a legacy caller changing speed is not silently ignored. Trade-off worth naming: speed is now tied to the presentation rate rather than to real time. If the loop cannot keep up with the panel the scroll runs slow rather than jumping to catch up. That is the better failure -- uniform motion at a slightly wrong speed beats correct average speed with a hitch six times a second -- and a loop that cannot hit the resolved rate is a measurement problem for the crisp ladder, not something to paper over with uneven steps. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * test(scroll): make the time-based pin actually pin something Review caught that test_time_based_stepping_is_what_it_replaces could pass against perfectly uniform motion, and it was right. update_scroll_position sets last_update_time on its way through, so the very first call sees a delta_time of zero and moves nothing in time-based mode. _advances counted that synthetic frame, which put a guaranteed zero in every histogram -- enough on its own to satisfy "uneven > 0". The test asserting the defect exists would have passed after the defect was gone. The first call is now primed and discarded, and the assertion is a proportion rather than "more than zero": against these frame times the old path misses roughly one frame in twenty, so 1% is well below the real rate and far above anything a stray frame could produce. Re-measured with the artefact removed, the numbers in the PR description are unchanged: 5.85% of frames uneven before (114 zero-advance and 120 double frames in 4000), 0.00% after. Also fills in the docstrings the review flagged: everything in the new test file, plus three pre-existing one-liners in scroll_config that the diff touched. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> --------- Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>