Help please, keeping track of passed time...

Unity Engine
1

Regards,

I’m new to unity. I searched the whole forum for an answer on how to keep track of passed time. say an alarm system for exapmle, so i can do things on a timely basis.

To give you an overview of what i’m going to do, assume that I have a script that checks for user input. when input is recieved, I want to move a cube for, let’s say, 3 seconds, and disable input checking. after 3 second, i want to enable input checking again, and do some other things. I’m sure you have faced this before.

I tried to use yield to wait, but it says that yield can’t be executed inside update() or something like that. i feel a little dumb here :sweat_smile: , but hey, i’m new. so please bear with me :stuck_out_tongue:

2

Sounds like you need two things here. First, you need a state variable for your cube. Something like isMoving : boolean should do the trick. Use that to check if input should be handled or not. Second, you need a timer to keep track of how long the cube remains in that state. Try this snippet as a starting point:

var isMoving : boolean = false;
var moveStart : float;
var moveDuration : int = 3;

function Update()
{
   if([whatever input check you need]  !isMoving)
   {
      isMoving = true;
      moveStart = Time.time;
   }
   if(Time.time - moveStart > moveDuration)
      isMoving = false;
   if(isMoving)
      DoMove();
}

I’m sure there is a more efficient way to condense what is there, but I think you’ll get the gist of what you need to do. I’ve actually created a simple timer class, as I realised that time checks come into play quite a bit in games. I even think there is a timer script on the wiki, so look into that to if timing becomes prevalent in your game.

3

Maker16, you’re my man. thanks for the sample code, as it gives me exactly what i want. i thought maybe there’s a buit-in timer system that care for such situations. but it looks that every time dependent event should be compared to a general reference, like Time.time …

Tnx again.