I am making a game in which u have to carry move objects from one place to another. I can move my character to the zone in which I need to put something. I want the player to wait in the zone for 5 secs before the object is placed there, however, if i do this you cannot move anymore if u decide u dont want to place the object in the zone as the whole script would be paused.
Is there a way to make one part of the script wait while the rest of it runs?
Every game needs one clock to keep the game loop in sync and to control timing. Pygame has a pygame.time.Clock object with a tick() method. Here's what a game loop could look like to get the behaviour you want (not complete code, just an example).
clock = pygame.time.Clock()
wait_time = 0
have_visited_zone = False
waiting_for_block_placement = False
# Game loop.
while True:
# Get the time (in milliseconds) since last loop (and lock framerate at 60 FPS).
dt = clock.tick(60)
# Move the player.
player.position += player.velocity * dt
# Player enters the zone for the first time.
if player.rect.colliderect(zone.rect) and not have_visited_zone:
have_visited_zone = True # Remember to set this to True!
waiting_for_block_placement = True # We're now waiting.
wait_time = 5000 # We'll wait 5000 milliseconds.
# Check if we're currently waiting for the block-placing action.
if waiting_for_block_placement:
wait_time -= dt # Decrease the time if we're waiting.
if wait_time <= 0: # If the time has gone to 0 (or past 0)
waiting_for_block_placement = False # stop waiting
place_block() # and place the block.
Example with threading:
from threading import Thread
def threaded_function(arg):
# check if it's been 5 seconds or user has left
thread = Thread(target = threaded_function, args = (10, ))
if user is in zone:
thread.start()
# continue normal code
Another potential solution is to check the time the user went into the zone and continuously check the current time to see if it's been 5 seconds
Time check example:
import time
entered = false
while true:
if user has entered zone:
entered_time = time.time()
entered = true
if entered and time.time() - entered_time >= 5: # i believe time.time() is in seconds not milliseconds
# it has been 5 seconds
if user has left:
entered=false
#other game code
time
5 to 5000 to convert to millisecondsleep(5) in the threaded function it will not affect the main thread, i'm not sure how pygame.wait(5) behaves
thread.join()(see link for code) would make the main thread wait until the started thread has completed to continue running.