I use a timer when I do computergames that need constantly upgrades, but in the book “Developing games in java” it shows how to do a homemade gameloop.
The loop would loke something like this:
while(isRunning){
//Update game here
thread.sleep(20);
}
But this way I think the game speed will depend on how fast the updating is.
But what do you guys think is the best solution?
For fast games I prefer to use a timer and calculate the time elapsed since the last update and trigger events after x seconds.
but this method requires a more complex organisation and more computations everywhere. And it uses more CPU, could be a problem with multi threads maybe.
t=system time (let's suppose all times are represented in seconds)
et1=0; //event 1 is triggered every 0.1 seconds
et2=0; //event 2 is triggered every 2.5 seconds
while(isRunning)
{
if (et1>=0.1)
{
//fire event 1
et1-=0.1;
//if you can afford to loose some calls to event1
// in the case your computer is too slow to update every 0.1 seconds ; you could prefer
//et1=et1%0.1;
//if for example you want the player's energy to go down of X points every 0.1 seconds you should use instead:
//a=et/0.1;
//et=et%0.1;
//energy-=a*X;
}
//same for event2
//Update rest of the game here
et1+=system time-t;
et2+=system time-t;
t=system time;
}
Well the method you use in that code is using a Timer right?
yes.
Well depends what you mean by “timer”
“thread.sleep(20)” could be considered a timer too.
I mean an instace of the Timer class.
[quote]Well the method you use in that code is using a Timer right?
[/quote]
Use the model/view/controler patern with your 2d games.
Run your controler in a thread and your viewer in another and use some the model to synchronize between the controler and the viewer.
A timer is just an object that will be started in his own thread and send a message to your thread after a certain time.