Make game logic timed entities independent of Unity's time

Hi,

I'm trying to come up with a good solution to a problem I have. I want to be able to "stop the game", I mean, having the top-right countdown timer stop, have all enemies and characters stop animating, etc. while still be able to have the Unity timer running for things like do smooth fades or something like that.

Do any one you has made something like that and is willing to share some knowledge here?

Thanks in advance,

 

I haven't had to do anything like this yet myself, so hopefully others will comment as well. The MonoBehaviour class has an OnApplicationPause event that gets dispatched to all your game objects. You might be able to use that to control which things stop and which do not.

Hope this helps!

 

The simplest thing is to set Time.timeScale to .0000000001 or something, and instead of using Time.deltaTime for the smooth fades, use Time.deltaTime/Time.timeScale. This isn't quite totally paused, obviously, but unless someone's planning on pausing the game and then resuming it centuries later, it probably doesn't matter.

--Eric

 

So for those entities I still want to be able to move when paused, I'd do that Time.deltaTime / Time.timeScale. Hmm, that's clever

I'll have to test if pausing like 30 minutes (you know, someone calls and you have to answer, or something like that) makes the scene moving at timeScale 0.00000001 moves significantly or not.

I guess I could always set it to zero, and then IF and WHEN I have to move something, set it to that low value, and after the movement reset it to zero.

 

Well, .0000000001 is a billion times slower than normal (literally), so 30 minutes pausing means about .0000018 seconds of game time actually pass, which probably isn't noticeable. But if it is, you can do less than .0000000001...not sure what the limit is....

--Eric

 

You can write a script that uses Time.realTimeSinceStartup, and creates its own little deltaTime. realTimeSinceStartup isn't affected by timescale.

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. //RealTime.js
3. static var deltaTime : float;
4. var previousTime : float = 0.0;
5. function Update() {
6. deltaTime = realTimeSinceStartup - previousTime;
7. previousTime = Time.time;
8. }
9.  

And then in your fadein/out etc scripts, use RealTime.deltaTime instead of deltaTime.

 

Yep, I have such a system. I track my game objects and send them messages when I want them to pause/resume etc. Works great, and I can have physics and other stuff running while "paused", if I want to.