Is it bad practice to set the velocity of an object every loop?

Question

Say I have a simple game with a gameLoop function that gets called every 50 milliseconds or something similar, and I have a box2d object. Is it bad practice/too CPU intensive to use SetLinearVelocity on the object every time the gameLoop is called?

Answer 1

It's only bad if you find this to be detrimental to the performance of your game. I find it unlikely that setting the velocity directly would be very expensive.

If you do find that this is an issue, by profiling the code, you can create a simple function that only updates the box2D object's velocity if your external velocity value has changed. Something like:

if(velocity != oldVelocity) {
    box2DObject.SetLinearVelocity(velocity);
    oldVelocity = velocity;
}