By this point, you have seen us use a lot of timers in the game. You may have even picked up on the fact that our collision timer was set a little lower than most of our other timers. We have set it to 0.1 seconds rather than 0.03 (30 frames per second) because we were checking the collision on a couple of pretty big rectangles. The bullet couldn't get through the entire player's rectangle in a tenth of a second; so, in order to keep the number of times I check the collision down, I just reduced the number of times I called the method. This may seem a little extreme at first, but the reality is that the more you add to your screen, the more it is going to slow down. Similarly, the number of times you are checking your methods in a timer, the more you are going to slow your game down.

The motion picture industry standard for film is 24 frames per second. In the games industry, we usually lock our frame rates to 30 or 60 fps. There are some 3D games that don't lock their...