Question

I would like to make “engine” for my console application that will count the time passed and force the application to do time-based event when certain amount of time has passed. I think about creating a simple text-based strategy game for education purposes (not for homework, just for me).

I tried to create the engine but I didn’t go too far. I do not know how can I apply time-based events break currently pending action in application etc, first here is how I made it:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <conio.h>
#include <Windows.h>
void _sleep(int t);
int main()
{
int seconds_passed = 0; //counts how much time passed since application started
while(1)
{
    //if(seconds_passed == 100) ... time based action
_sleep(1000);
printf("test");
seconds_passed += 1;
}

return 0;
}


void _sleep(int t) 
{ 
    int i;
    for (i = 0; i < (t/100); i++) 
    { 
        Sleep(100); 
    if (kbhit()!= 0)
        {
            getch();
            break; 
    }
    }
}

I tried to make function similar to Sleep() from windows.h, but with ability to break the delay when key is pressed (I don’t know if im going the correct way) – in loop it will start “time passing”, but I want it to be independent of the rest of the code, so it will work silently and take control over action in rest of the code. I need help in any of following things:

-using keyboard to break _sleep() function shouldn’t automatically increase amount of “seconds passed”

-how to make timer independent of action happening in the code? I thought about creating something that could break the whole while(1) loop every second (probably it could be my modified _sleep function), increase counter and go back to the code part where it broke (it would abuse scanf() actions in application but it isnt a problem for now)

-I heard about select() function that maybe could be useful here, anybody has any experience with it and can tell me more?

Answer 1

Don’t know if this is a usable answer but when I built a rudimetary game I made it multi threaded in this way:

1. The event thread would push a message onto a thread safe message
   queue when the user does something.
2. The “game” thread reads the message queue, processes data, renders the output onto
   the screen and then sleeps for a certain amount of time.

In this way the event thread could remain blocked until user input occurred while game logic and input/output was done in a simple synchronized way.
Windows has a threading library you can use (although I haven”t used that one yet as I always use boost threads or posix threads on linux.)