[ACS_Solver]

The article's indeed light on details, but what it describes sounds very similar to autonomous driving / driver assistance software I have experience with. That's not really surprising, as the overall system for an autonomous car and a spaceship is very similar - keep processing inputs from sensors, calculate some values and manage state machines, use those results to adjust outputs, some of which may operate actuators, and repeat.

The similarity with game event loops is IMO superficial. A game typically processes events as fast as it can, and the time between any two iterations of the loop is completely unpredictable. One frame could render in 20ms and the next in 25ms, which is completely fine. For a car or spaceship though, there are hard real-time requirements. Like the article describes, some Dragon tasks run every 100ms, others run every 20ms. A lot of effort has definitely gone into making sure the tasks can complete quickly enough, with some margin, and there are definitely systems that monitor these deadlines and treat even one timing miss as a major failure.

[hutzlibu]

"One frame could render in 20ms and the next in 25ms, which is completely fine."

No it is not fine, if you want to have a real smooth gameplay. So also in game loops, you can adjust for that, by checking timediff.

But sure, the difference is that, if you miss a frame in a game loop - no real rockets crash, so there is probably (and hopefully) not as much effort put into that, like they do on SpaceX.

[ACS_Solver]

Framerates are averaged over much longer periods than two frames. Rendering 45 frames in 20ms each and then having a couple take 25ms just doesn't matter mostly, and addressing that is the kind of extra "nice to have" (and even then not for every kind of game). Yeah it's nice to have consistent frame times but less important than avoiding individual frames getting very slow, and a framerate drop certainly won't be treated by the engine as a critical failure that causes e.g. a crash or restart.

On a hard real-time system like the Dragon, failing the deadline once is a critical error just like a game engine being unable to talk to the GPU.

[dralley]

This is just the distinction between soft real-time and hard real-time.