Question

I’m doing a little beginner c++ program based on the game of snap.

When i output the card objects to the console, because of the computers processing speed naturally, a whole list of the cards that were dealt just appears. I thought it might be nice if i could put a pause between each card deal so that a human could actually observe each card being dealt. Since i’m always working on both Linux and Windows and already had < ctime > included i came up with this little solution:

for(;;){
            if( (difftime(time(0),lastDealTime)) > 0.5f){ //half second passed
                cout << currentCard <<endl;
                lastDealTime = time(0);
                break;
            }
        }

At first i thought it had worked but then when i tried to speed up the dealing process later i realised that changing the control value of 0.5 (i was aiming for a card deal every half a second) didn’t seem to have any effect.. i tried changing it to deal every 0.05 seconds and it made no difference, cards still seemed to be output every second i would guess.

Any observations as to why this wouldn’t be working? Thanks!

Answer 1

time() and difftime() have a resolution of a second, to there’s no
way to use them to manage intervals of less than a second; even for
intervals of a second, they’re not usable, since the jitter may be up to
a second as well.

In this case, the solution is to define some sort of timer class, with a
system independent interface in the header file, but system dependent
source files; depending on the system, you compile one source file or
the other. Both Windows and Linux do have ways of managing time with
higher resolution.