AutoType and Coroutine Performance

Hi!
I want to have text type out letter by letter. I'm using the AutoType script found on the wiki, but just modified it to work with the new UI.
Found here: http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/AutoType

I'm using the new UI, so the only change I really made was use UnityEngine.UI, and have it access the text with gameObject.GetComponent<Text>().text;

What I want to happen is have my text type out, but if they don't want to wait, they can tap the text and it speeds up really fast. Even when I put a delay of 0 in, the typing speed can never get fast enough to type out a paragraph in less than a few seconds. I'd need it to be less than a second.

The problem is even worse when I deploy the game to my phone, even with a delay of 0 each paragraph take about 6 seconds.

It makes sense to me that it's affected by CPU performance, but are coroutines inherently this slow, or is there something I can do to speed it up?

Thanks!

 

Coroutines aren't slow, but using a delay of 0 is a bad idea because that makes everything framerate-dependent, so the time taken depends on the framerate, since you're doing 1 character per frame. Use different logic (instead of 1 character per x time, do x characters per x time).

--Eric

 

Thanks for your quick reply Eric!

I'm still pretty new to Unity, but I *think* I understand what you're saying. So setting it to 0 means that the fastest it can possibly go is how long it takes to go through a draw/update loop, so suddenly it is going to feel different on each device.

So if I need something faster than what a given processor can handle, it just makes more sense to output more characters per update. And to ensure a similar experience on all platforms, use a time greater than 0, is that right?

 

Exactly. Although the best way to print text quickly would probably be to figure out how many characters per frame should be output. e.g., if you were getting 60fps, say 10 characters per frame, and if you're getting 30fps, then it should be 20 characters per frame. However, that's more complex to program than, say, just outputting 100 characters every 1/6 second and probably wouldn't look that different.

In general you don't want to go too small with WaitForSeconds values, since varying framerates can cause imprecision...Unity won't wait the exact amount of time, but rather it will wait for the closest time that corresponds to the nearest frame. In other words, the smallest amount of time it can wait is whatever the current framerate is.

--Eric

 

Thanks, re-worked my logic and it works better than I expected.

I appreciate the help!

 

Hi @riot9 can you show how you got this to work? I am trying to do this with the new UI Text object. I replaced

Code (CSharp):

1. using UnityEngine;

with

Code (CSharp):

1. using UnityEngine.UI;

and instances of

Code (CSharp):

1. guiText.text

with

Code (CSharp):

1. gameObject.GetComponent<Text>().text

But would like to know how you were able to have the player tap to make the text speed up.

 

Hey AlphaGTR,

Sorry for the late reply. I actually ran into problems speeding it up when tapping and decided to have it just fill the entire text out immediately when they tap. So to do that I made a method that would stop all the coroutines and then just set the text to the full source.

I set up an invisible image to catch their tap that would call the method that stops the coroutine and fills the text in. Tapping that image also disables the image so it doesn't interfere with scrolling (mine's a mobile game).