I've been lurking around your site for a while, and your tutorials/crash course has been very helpful to get me back in the swing of things when r/l gives me enough of a break to code. Thank you!
I was reading through your descriptions of how XNA handles the update, draw, and wait periods in the game loop with a fixed timestep. I understand that it will start skipping things when an update loop runs long, but I'm confused as to how. An infinite loop like the one you coded in the article should, more or less, hold things up there and prevent the game loop from continuing, shouldn't it? Is there inherent threading in the game loop that breaks the update, or is there something else allowing XNA to skip over that infinite loop?
When using a variable timestep, given that the update loop will take as long as it needs to, wouldn't it also be prudent to establish a maximum physics timestep when using a variable timestep game loop, or are there problems that would arise from doing so? (ie, to prevent a character from lurching through a wall instead of colliding with it when an update takes too long for whatever reason) Where would the "best" place to define this be?