Question Combine an int value with a float rate?

Hi everybody,

i am sure the solution is easy but i am facing some issues with the following scenario:

In my game the player collects coins which are ints. I am working on a function where the collected coins can be deposited whenever the player holds down a certain button. Which looks like this and works fine:

public void DepositMoney()
{
if (Input.GetButtonDown("Melee"))
{
scoreValue--; // store the collected coins somewhere else

}
}

Since i am calling this in the Update method the coins get deposited nearly instantly, but i want a float rate
to handle the speed of the function. (So the player will be satisfied with a loooong lasting deposit of all the valuable coins.)

The simple solution would be:

public void DepositMoney()
{
if (Input.GetButtonDown("Melee"))
{
scoreValue -= transferRate * Time.deltaTime; // add a transfer rate to control the duration
}
}

With all variables as floats, this works fine. But since my scoreValue is an int, its not working. I tried certain methods of rounding and converting but to my own surprise i struggle really hard with this issue which i thought chatGPT could solve within a second (it didnt.)

There must be a pretty simple solution, right?

Thanks in advance!

 

chatGPT gives three different ways to do it. The first and simple one being this

Code (CSharp):

1. float floatValue = 42.75f;
2. int intValue = (int)floatValue;
3.  

 

create a float called timer and each frame add to it with deltatime* said speed multiplier, and only allow it to deposit at
<= 1 or something, and then reset the timer once it reaches your maximum. or you could just use a coroutine.

 

Separate data from presentation!

Data assignment is instant. This triggers an animation though which makes numbers run through from current value down to zero.

This also prevents bugs where something would stop or break the depositing process and the player losing or gaining extra points. The animation can be safely aborted, the actual value has already been updated.

 

@CodeSmile has the appropriate solution here, unless the player is supposed to be able to stop half-way through depositing the coins. But as this is about a score conversion, i dont think you need to handle such a case.

So when the player deposits his coins, directly set his actual coins to zero, and set some floating point value to the amount of coins he had, which you then display as decreasing until it reaches 0 (over how long or short a period you desire). This decreasing can happen on the float value itself, but for the representation you likely want to cast it as an integer, since it's still supposed to represent coins

 

Quite obviously this can't work, as you're losing information every time you tamper with the intermediate result.
You need to do this

Code (csharp):

1. scoreValue -= transferRate * Time.deltaTime; // this is what you compute
2. scoreValueInt = (int)Mathf.Floor(scoreValue); // this is what you display

 

Thanks for your replies! That was pretty helpful. In my specific case, since i wanted the player to be able to interrupt the deposit when releasing the button, i now implemented a workaround: I instantiate the coin prefab f.e. 5 per second, allowing only as much prefabs as the score itself. The prefabs then get sucked into the deposit zone via physics where they get added to the final score. Maybe a little "fancy" but it works fine and gives the result i wanted without breaking anything else.

Again, thank you very much!