How can i do stuffs when timescale is zero?

Scripting
1

Hello everyone, recently I saw some tutorials about how to do a pause for your game, in all the tactic was the same, set Time.timescale to zero.
This really works, all in-game for, run Update(), but other updates like FixedUpdate() stop completely, like physics simulation and animations. So, for such a purpose to pause the game, this is incredible, however, I came across the following difficulty: How to do something when you “to” the game? I mean, usually you pause the game to show a menu of settings, and if I want this menu to appear in an animated way, I do not know, changing its alpha from 0 to 1 maybe? I could not do that with animations because they are not reproduced while timescale is zero. I also could not use Coroutine, because they also stop running. So, how would I do to perform some actions even with timescale at zero?
(Sorry for bad english, is google translate :smile:)

How can I drive an animation while timescale is = 0?
2

unscaledTime and unscaledDeltaTime:

Can’t do much about FixedUpdate.

Coroutines shouldn’t stop, unless you use WaitForFixedUpdate.

1 Like
3

Also, the Animator component allows you to use Unscaled Time in its animations - very handy for menu animation. Unity - Manual: Animator component

4

Personally though I don’t like how there really is only 2 times, and that they have no object identity.

This is why I wrote my own TimeSupplier:

With this interface:

That way I can have various times for various situations… as well as stacking time scales.

1 Like
5

Guys, you’re all right, and I was wrong in one thing (or several), doing some tests, I noticed that the Coroutines do not really stop (not under certain conditions). Look at this code:

public bool gamePaused = false;
private void Start()
{
    StartCoroutine(CoroutineTest());
}

private void Update()
{
    if (Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.Escape))
    {
        if (!gamePaused)
        {
            gamePaused = !gamePaused;
            Time.timeScale = 0f;
        }
        else
        {
            gamePaused = !gamePaused;
            Time.timeScale = 1f;
        }
    }

    updateText.text = "Update: " + Random.Range(1, 10);
}

private void FixedUpdate()
{
    fixedUpdateText.text = "FixedUpdate: " + Random.Range(11, 20);
}

private void LateUpdate()
{
    lateUpdateText.text = "LateUpdate: " + Random.Range(21, 30);
}

private IEnumerator CoroutineTest()
{
    while (true)
    {
        coroutineText.text = "Coroutine: " + Random.Range(31, 40);

    yield return null;
    }
}

Testing this code, one thing I noticed is that every time the timeScale was set to zero, Update(), LateUpdate() continued to run. And Coroutines rode under certain circumstances…
As I said before, many things stop with timeScale at zero, however, I was wrong to say that Coroutines also stopped, actually Coroutines only stop if you return a WaitForSeconds (). But if you return null or some other data types do not. So I did some testing and noticed that you can use Coroutines to do things while timeScale is zero.
For Coroutines the following returns will run while timeScale is zero:
yield return null,
yield return new WaitForEndOfFrame(),
yield return new WaitForSecondsRealtime().

Thank you for helping!