Question

I have tried various setups with input and my one second timer but nothing is working. The entire code is brought to a halt when it reaches the part asking for input. I have an unbuffered stream, so I don’t need to press enter to send the input. Also the purpose of this is for a pac-man game I’m designing for terminal use. What I want is basically to have a one second interval where the user can enter a command. If no command is entered, I want the pac-man to continue moving the direction it was moving the last time a command was entered.

EDIT:

time_t startTime, curTime;

    time(&startTime);
    do
    {
        input=getchar();
        time(&curTime);
    } while((curTime - startTime) < 1);

Answer 1

My gut feeling tells me this:

• Have one thread dedicated to processing user input and putting key events into a queue
• The timer-activated thread, on every activation, consumes all key events in the queue, using the one that happened last, at the point of thread activation.

Make sure your access to the queue is synchronized.

// I/O Thread:
while (!stop) {
    input = getchar();
    lock_queue();
    queue.push_back(input);
    unlock_queue();
}

// Timer Thread:
while (!stop) {
    lock_queue();
    if (queue.size() == 0) {
        action = DEFAULT_ACTION;
    } else {
        // either handle multiple key events somehow
        // or use the last key event:
        action = queue.back();
        queue.clear();
    }
    unlock_queue();
    perform_action(action);
    sleep();
}

Full example posted as a Github Gist.