system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What is a"Tick" in gaming development terminology.
gpt
If you have a game that runs in realtime, you are generally simulating some processes - they can be as simple as Mario moving right and jumping, or as complicated as the physics in a flight simulator.

But the key point is that you cannot simulate these processes perfectly smoothly - you cannot have an infinite number of simulation steps per second, because that would require infinite computing power. So what games do is that they cut up time into discrete steps, and the calculations are done for each step.

Each of those steps is a tick, and having a tick of, say, 10 ms means that you have one of those steps every 10 ms, or 100 every second.