Making a simple countdown timer

Questions & Answers
1

I’m working on a simple racing game and I want to add a countdown timer, but I can’t get it to work. Any advice after seeing the code?

public float countdown;

    void Start()
    {
        Time.timeScale = 0f;
    }

    void Update()
    {
        countdown -= Time.deltaTime;
        if (countdown < 0)
        {
            Time.timeScale = 1f;
        }
        else if (countdown > 0)
        {
            Time.timeScale = 0f;
        }
    }
2

Since you initially set Time.timeScale to 0, Time.deltaTime is always going to be 0.

(note - Time.timeScale changes the timeScale for everything in the current scene, not a single object.)

Here’s a small script I created for a countdown:

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

public class Countdown : MonoBehaviour {

    public float countdown = 10.0f; //The amount of time to wait
    private float _time = 0;        //The current progress
    private bool called = false;    //If the countdown has been met.

    void Update()
    {
        if (!called)
        {
            _time += Time.deltaTime;
            if (_time >= countdown)
            {
                called = true;
                DoStuff();
            }
        }
    }

    void DoStuff()
    {

    }

}

I did it this way because of the nature of your question. Due to your statement about how it is a racing game, I assumed you would want an onscreen countdown of sorts, of which this script supports. If you did not want to do an OnScreen countdown, then you could simply do:

public class Countdown : MonoBehaviour {

    public float countdown = 10.0f; //The amount of time to wait

    void Start()
    {
        Invoke("DoStuff", countdown);
    }

    void DoStuff()
    {

    }

}