Two timelines?

Unity Engine
1

I’m having a hard time pausing my game AND having time-dependent transitions for my PauseMenu’s buttons (like increase its size a bit gradually when mouse is over, and decreasing it back to normal when mouse leaves the button), since for pausing I use Time.timeScale=0.

Is there any other way to pause the game or its entities without affecting Time functions?

I thought about having a Pausable behavior which would be attached to any GameObject I want to be able to pause, and be something like:

var paused = false;

function Update()
{
 if (!paused)
  gameObject.BroadcastMessage("DoUpdate");
}
function FixedUpdate()
{
 if (!paused)
  gameObject.BroadcastMessage("DoFixedUpdate");
}

Then using DoUpdate/DoFixedUpdate instead of the standard functions for every GO with the Pausable behavior, and also using some other pause-aware Timer object instead of Time.time when needed (I guess Time.deltaTime would be OK to use).

What do you think? Any other easier way?

2

I would introduce “realTimePassed” by doing Time.deltaTime / Time.timeScale and use that for your pause button code. You need to watch out for when timescale goes to 0, but apart from that, it should be fairly easy…

3

Well, that’s the deal: I do set Time.timeScale to zero in order to pause the simulation, but I want time-based transitions for my GUI in the pause menu (which is a couple of buttons: Resume and Quit). Yeah, I could live without them, but I want them to have the same look feel of my main menu buttons.

4

Is this a webplayer or standalone? If standalone, you could use .Net’s DateTime.now to get the system time from the user’s machine

5

There is also Time.realtimeSinceStartup, which seems to be a perfect fit:

6

@freyr that just fills my needs, thanks :slight_smile:

7

In the Big Bang Brain Games I used the DateTime class for this so I didn’t have to worry about floating point accuracy as realTimeSinceStartup got high. I am suspicious there is some Mono bug with this method on some machines based on some reports I’ve had, but it seems pretty darn rare.

using UnityEngine;
using System;

public class Timer
{
	DateTime startTime;
	
	public Timer()
	{
		Reset();
	}
	
	public void Reset()
	{
		startTime = DateTime.Now;
	}
	
	public float ElapsedSeconds()
	{
		TimeSpan span = DateTime.Now.Subtract(startTime);
		
		return ((float)span.Ticks / (float)TimeSpan.TicksPerSecond);
	}
	
	public long ElapsedTicks()
	{
		TimeSpan span = DateTime.Now.Subtract(startTime);
		
		return span.Ticks;
	}
}

Usage:

Timer timer = new Timer();
Debug.Log(timer.ElapsedSeconds());

Should probably make those functions properties for cleanliness.

Cheers,
-Jon