Question Update is 5x too fast

I've tried update and fixedupdate, both are running about five times too fast. I haven't messed with the timescale or anything at all. All I'm doing is a simple counter within the update (or fixedupdate) where the counter goes down, and if it reaches zero then it will spawn an enemy, then go back up to its spawn time. FixedUpdate runs 50 times a second, and yet it's going at about 250 a second. I set the TimeBetweenSpawns to 250, and it spawned an enemy about every second. When I set it to 2,500 then it spawned one every 10 seconds, so clearly it's running five times faster than it should. My scripts are very simple so far, I'm just starting, and I've never had my updates run this fast before, so I'm very confused. Here's the script.

Code (CSharp):

1.     void Update()
2.     {
3.         HowMuchTime -= 1;
4.         if (HowMuchTime <= 0 && HowManyToSpawn >= 1)
5.         {
6.             HowManyToSpawn -= 1;
7.             HowMuchTime = TimeBetweenSpawns;
8.             var NewEnemy = Instantiate(EnemyType, transform.position, Quaternion.identity);
9.         }
10.     }

Also I'm sorry for the tags. This site honestly has the worst tagging system I've ever seen. Every tag I've entered doesn't exist, and none of the recommended make any sense for this question.

 

It's because you're counting frames in your code, so it's rate is entirely dependant on your frame rate.

Use a timer by incrementing a float value by

Time.deltaTime

, which is the actual time between frames. This is a fundamental Unity principle.

 

From what I understand, what you said is correct only in the case of it being in Update. When I put it in FixedUpdate it should only have 50 frames a second, right? So why is it counting 250 frames a second in FixedUpdate too? Thanks for the help!

 

I'm gonna say 'not sure why' off the top of my head, but in any situation where you want to measure time reliably you should be using the Time class and it's various deltaTime properties, rather than counting frames of Unity's magic methods.

 

Is that counter static, and do you have five instances of the spawner? That would make it count down five times too quickly.

If not, then showing the entire script would be helpful. You said you're using FixedUpdate, but that code block is in Update

You should check that you haven't done something to the fixed timestep. Check the settings in here:



As spiney said, though, there are very few reasons to count frames instead of seconds.

 

Nothing in your code is doing anything to pin this timer to a "number of seconds" so any comparison to real time passage of seconds is useless. Your current timer is counting frames rather than an amount of time. Frames are not a consistent measure of time. Framerates fluctuate wildly constantly. They will also be very different on different computers and hardware and under different software load.

Long story short - don't use frame count as a timer. You can convert your timer from counting frames to counting seconds using

Time.deltaTime

.

Simple example:

Code (CSharp):

1. float timer = 0;
2.  
3. void Update() {
4.   timer += Time.deltaTime;
5.  
6.   Debug.Log($"Current time is: {timer}");
7. }

 

Thanks all, I switched to taking off time.deltatime and it works properly now.
I'm still confused why the FixedUpdate was going at 250 a second. I input it in the inspector to get the numbers like 250 and 2500, but it was consistently going about 5x faster than it should, even in FixedUpdate. Either way I'll try to use time.deltatime more often now. I've never really understood what the value of it was, but what you've all said makes sense. Thanks!