Question

I have been writing a text based video game in java (I’m new to java, btw), and it does not have the performance i have been hoping for, specifically speech. I want the text to appear as if the person is speaking (I don’t want it to appear all at once, just character by character). I have achieved the effect with this code:

void speak(String speak){
    for(int x = 0; x < speak.length(); x++){
        System.out.print(speak.charAt(x));
        pause(talkSpeed);
    }
}

talkSpeed is the object’s speed of talking. pause is a function I made to make Thread.sleep easier. Too lazy to write try catch all the time. My only problem with this code is that it does not print to console very smoothly. It seems jerky, like it’s lagging a bit. It looks like it prints world by word and not letter by letter. I don’t understand why, it is a fairly simple piece of code. Maybe it is pause, and i should just use Thread.sleep. Also, im wondering how i can make the cursor follow the text.

Or should I just rewrite this in c++ to get that performance boost? I know approx the same amount of C++

void pause(double time){
    long y = (long) (1000 * time);
    try {
        Thread.sleep(y);
    } catch (InterruptedException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
}

someone asked for the code to the pause function, so here it is

Answer 1

I believe System.out is buffered, try to call System.out.flush() before the pause.