IntervalTimer

Introduction

When programming a game you'll depend on timers heavily. Whether you have a damage effect, that needs to be calculated every x seconds, or a visual special effect to be controlled, you'll steer all that by adding time to variable and checking it against a limit.

Like with every work that gets repetitive, you'll get sloppy and you'll make mistakes.

And it's precicely for this reason that I wrote this class.

Description

It should have a constructor where you would have to declare the timeout in milliseconds you want to measure.

Then you would have to update it every game-cycle, giving it the current gameTime object. Its update method will do the appropriate math with the appropriate values hidden in the gameTime object and return true, if the timeout has been reached.

It has some convenience-properties, which you may use to determine the percentage of time passed, to determine the time that is still left, or to reset or change the interval itself.

You may use a defaulted field in the update method, if you wish to add the excess time, that was not used after "triggering" the timer, to the next run of the timer (in case you have some sort of a cyclic timer because otherwise you would just "lose" this excess time).

 

References

• You may download the code here: IntervalTimer.zip