What are the "Steps" settings?

[marian-c]

What are the following settings in the preferences panel?

• Steps per clock tick (defaults to 250)
• Steps per second (target) (defaults to 1000)

What is a clock tick, and maybe more importantly: what is a step?

Feel free to go into details on how the simulation works behind the scene, I'm actually interested in that but I thought I start off from the user settings.

Thank you.

[marian-c]

Taking a shot in the dark here since I'm not fluent in c#

• a step is an "internal simulation tick / loop"
• Steps per second (target) = 1000 - this targets a max of 1000 steps per second, either to allow the cpu to do something else or to allow the user to say "not so fast, I can't see what's happening"; I assume this will slow down if the computer (host) can't handle it
• Steps per clock tick = 250 - this is a way of timing the clock component; in this case, the clock will tick 4 times per second, or less if the host computer can't handle it

[EdanThomton]

This is a bit of a late reply, but you are correct here. A step is a single evaluation of the circuit, steps per second is how many are executed every second, and steps per clock tick is how many steps there is every single time the clock changes state.

[martinm07]

Yes, the "Steps per clock tick" setting refers specifically to the "CLOCK" component in your "BASIC" collection, in the library, right?
How many simulation steps the clock will wait for before changing from low to high, or from high to low.