Confused about pausing

Unity Engine
1

Hi All,

I’ve been looking through the forum for methods for pausing a game. I’ve got the Time.timeScale set to zero - that’s fine.

However not all my functions are time dependent. For example a function called from Update checks if a button is pressed and activates a power up. This is a one shot function and will trigger regardless of time scale.

At the moment the only thing I can think to remedy this is to have something like…

function Update ()
{
   if (GameHandler.instance.paused) return;

   OtherMethods ();
}

… at the top of the Update function before any methods are called. This seems like a lot of effort and quite easy to forget to do.

Is there a more standard/global approach to this problem?

2

The FixedUpdate function will not be called if your timescale is set to zero, so you might be able to put some of the one-shot controls in there. For GUI, there isn’t any way to pause other than to use the method you described above.

3

The way I’ve handled this in the past is to derive all component classes that need to be ‘pausable’ from a common base class (e.g. ‘Pausable’), and then, when the game is paused or unpaused, find all such objects using FindObjectsOfType() and enable/disable them as appropriate. (Doing the same thing with all particle system components will cause them to pause/unpause correctly as well.)

4

Thanks guys, some useful tips there. I was hoping there was some magic pause function but I guess you get lots of flexibility this way.