i have been doing this for a while playing around with shadertoy. i don't think i learned it from anywhere, i just wanted some things to match up and repeat over hours and it was obvious that sin/cos are periodic, and cycling the time value would improve the imprecision at the seam.
seeing it delivered as a clever trick in a blog post makes me wonder if i'm more competent than i thought, or if everyone else is generally less competent than i thought.
The trick isn't so much about looping the sine/cosine. It's about setting synchronizing the maximum time value passed to a shader, with maximum precision of an arbitrary multiplicand used in the shader.
> How do we ensure that, easily, in a way that people don't have to think about?
The relation is that the time should switch from 10^x to 0, and in the shader the number of digits after a dot should be no more than x.
Every now and then I have to remind myself that things that are obvious to me aren't obvious to everyone else. And thus, sometimes its worth explaining "obvious" things.
seeing it delivered as a clever trick in a blog post makes me wonder if i'm more competent than i thought, or if everyone else is generally less competent than i thought.