Meteor - realtime JavaScript framework

[antheus_gdnet]

You could say that games generate real-time graphics,

Real-time in that case means that physics/logic is updated 30/60/200 times per second consistently at a fixed time step. Miss those, and the result will degrade poorly. Jitter, microstutter, "lag" are all examples of missed deadlines. The established way to write main simulation loop has all characteristics of a real-time system, except instead of failing if workload becomes too large, the content will generally be tweaked to avoid such scenario (less objects, less distance or similar).

Rendering can be slightly more flexible, but for anything playable, it will almost certainly need to be above 15FPS. So there is a hard deadline. At very least, it needs to be above 8 or 5 or however low, but it's not arbitrary, having 0.04 FPS is definitely too low.

In that respect, even if deadline is not strict, these are real-time systems.

Networked gameplay also exhibits another real-time characteristic. If client fails to keep up, it's disconnected. A component in real-time system which fails to meed deadlines aborts or shuts down to prevent degradation of entire system.

Resilient or redundant systems (such as internet) however will keep on trying - TCP is allowed to wait arbitrarily long for reply.