Heartbeat courutine fx

Unity Engine
4

Again I would not reach for coroutines here.

The reason: you can go below the critical health, then go up, then go back down, and every single point in there is a chance to screw up how many coroutines are actually running.

Coroutines are great but they are the wrong solution for this problem.

Instead, make a heartbeat script and have a variable to count if it is time yet:

private float heartBeatYet;

In your Update() function, calculate the desired rate of heartbeat based on health:

float desiredInterval = 0;  // no heartbeat
if (health < 15)
{
  desiredInterval = 2.0f;  // sorta hurting
}
if (health < 10)
{
  desiredInterval = 1.5f;  // hurting more
}
if (health < 5)
{
  desiredInterval = 1.0f;  // really hurting!
}

Now that you have that interval:

if (desiredInterval > 0)
{
  // countdown until heartbeat needed
  heartBeatYet -= Time.deltaTime;

  // check if it is time for a heartbeat yet?
  if (heartBeatYet <= 0)
  {
    // reset timer for next heartbeat
    heartBeatYet += desiredInterval;

    // lub-dup...
    HeartBeatSound.Play();
  }
}

DONE. Now you can have multiple “urgencies” of heartbeat, no coroutines to start, stop, keep track of, etc. It just runs forever. When nothing is happening the only cost is a couple of compare statements.

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