GameMaker QuickTut: Time Sources

[@GlamourSwinexXx]

I can't believe it took this long to replace alarms but hey, better late than never! Looking forward to trying these out!

[@dcashley303]

Would love a more in-depth look at this for those of who only just got to grips with Alarms and general coding. This is much appreciated regardless, thank you!

[@questionmarkquestionmarkques]

respect for keeping the video short and not padding it out

[@Luke-op2rw]

Thank you so much Shaun! It took me 30 minutes to try to figure timers out so I go to your channel and it's almost the first video that comes up and you explain it all in a minute!

[@jeremyd.9103]

I have been learning a lot watching your videos. Great job bro!

[@chrishodgkinson322]

Holy crap! What an improvement over alarms. Love that you can choose frames or seconds. Brilliant video as usual Shaun. Nice and to the point.

[@SergiuNw]

This helps a lot. I always liked having less events created, cuz having to create 3-4 alarms for some objects made it so annoying for me.

[@mailmallett]

Gamemaker is getting better every month.

[@DragoniteSpam]

something tells me that we're on the verge of a golden age of One Script Games in gamemaker

[@TBird136]

I really love that new idea of making timers. Imma try these out one time

[@helboy1111]

Ooh I love this! I’m also sorta hoping they tackle array unpacking as they clearly are using it in these functions, fingers crossed :)

[@balint9423]

This is amazing, I always hated alarms and always just wrapped stuff in timer variables in my oGame objects.

[@-DeScruff]

Just getting back into Game Maker an oh boy this is great. So much easier then making your own alarm system in the step event.

[@abram-green]

Nice! Glad to know I’m not the only one who hated alarms lol.

[@chrono581]

Truth is I can see value in both alarms as I use alarms a ton but I like the more flexible system and not necessarily having it tied to framerate all the time is useful plus you're not necessarily limited to 12 per object which is nice

[@guidomenicacci336]

Reconfigurate? That’s awesom tou can make things like the first time, the player jump then the second one the time source get reconfigurated to shoot a laser in the second time. With talent, time_source_reconfigurate among with sequences can be used to create special action for the playable character and special attacks for enemies and bosses. These time source i think can be used even for a RPG project.

[@tdg_dev9429]

Despite the hullabaloo about the subscription model, I've been thrilled so far with the changes (and pace of changes!) that Opera has put into GM. It's been fantastic in my opinion.

[@ablationer]

Wait what? Sorry, I've been sleeping under a rock for over a year when it comes to GM. What subscription model?

[@orangeTadpole]

Nice little easy to understand feature

[@dimusikus]

time source нужная стоящая функция, ее давно не хватало

[@pistolshrimpbazooka8003]

You should just make these videos shorts as well because they are really good and would probably do real well

[@AlyxxTheRat]

Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention, this seems incredibly useful

[@NoahNCopeland]

I have an old script I liked called "wait_to_do" and this basically makes that no longer needed

[@relito_anima]

Thanks, this was very helpful!

[@Ver2ion]

Hey so ive never used alarms ive just been creating vars that start at 0 and a maxTime val then in the places I want to increase timer i just make if time < maxTime time ++ then and else statement to catch the completion im not sure exactly if i followed these new time sources or if my method is basically the same just easier with time sources

[@ArisTheMage]

Very cool. Alarms were sketchy anyway, I just used custom variables

[@MadJaze]

Is it may used to control sprite animations? For example, set a time source to get into ladder state without being able to move for a time, to be after in ladder state in a normal move?

[@Char2936]

Thats exactly what I am trying to figure out😤

[@wowi3814]

good for him

[@paulbeattie1717]

I never liked alarms. They seemed too inflexible to be any use to me. These do seem more usefull. Rarely finish a project to the point of running it on any other machine so never a problem! Lol.

[@zephadusjoltspark6951]

Please explain why I would not just use a variable thay ticks down and have the condition for whatever i want to happen be "if variable is less than 0".

[@alvin_row]

Why are these more flexible than alarms other than being able to use a global timer and seconds instead of frames? Having to create functions for them feels a bit weird lol. Still nice to know! I'll look more into it.

[@SaraSpalding]

pausing and stopping them is easier and generally a bit more intuitive, you also have slightly more direct control over exactly when they trigger and you can organize the code better instead of having to have their output as wholly separate events (that are also limited in number). You can also use and establish them outside of objects (as I do in this video using a script) to create your own looping structures, pseudo-step events and so on. Paired with structs etc it's now more or less possible to eschew using objects entirely if you want to. The most obvious great use of that is for extension/plugin creators to make completely "plug and play" extensions and tools that require no additional setup by the user.

[@TheHellokitty2009]

To me at least I find it a bit more complicated when you can just make your own alarm I have this in a script var Time = 15; If (time != 0) { var i = 0.01; time = time - i; } This is just a very basic way of doing it but should get the point across and suits what I currently use it for Edit: You can do basically the same thing if you want an object to fade as well instead you put image_alpha and you can just have it slowly decrease or decrease immediately to half which is 0.5 which will give you the same fade effect you can apply this to all objects or just one Sorry for long comment just something I thought I should add for people that are like me and don't want to deal with shaders and what have you lol

[@MoltiSanti]

If I understand correctly, the time source functions are meant to provide us with more flexibility for timers. Alarm events (and your example) rely on the game's framerate. So, in order to get around that, we would need to use delta time calculations. I'm hoping the time source functions help circumvent that.

[@yungefendi6480]

how i do it: timer = clamp(timer-global.time, 0, infinity); global.time as a variable usually set to 1 but frequently lower to simulate slow motion. almost all objects have their speed variables then multiplied with global.time.

[@plazies_]

Wow !

[@Char2936]

Damn it. Still cant get it to work. What event even is all this in

[@elenaditgoia2756]

What version of GameMaker have these been introduced?

[@mazimadu]

While I appreciate the improvement, wouldn't it be better to implement a proper observer pattern for signals and slots that replace/compliment the existing event system? This way you can build upon it and introduce new concepts in line with modern game development patterns

[@Egsslereal]

i need to stop it after 5 seconds how do im gonna do it

[@shanekirby6631]

Question: If you disabled the object that controls/creates the time source, will the time source also stop? Alarms do stop, making them a good way of delaying actions (for use when pausing, etc). But if time sources do not stop automatically, they could become tedious to use.

[@SaraSpalding]

In this video I created a time source with a global script (as all scripts are run on game launch) so no, they are not tied to objects/instances in this way. While I imagine the variable connecting to this time source will be garbage collected once there is no longer a reference to it, you can probably get it again by using time_source_get_children() on the global/game time source that you used as the parent. That's my guess, I haven't tested that hypothesis though.

[@LittleW00d]

@@SaraSpalding Timer's aren't automatically garbage collected as they're tied to either the game or global parent. I'm pushing a pointer into an array which manually destroys the time source in the cleanup event to get around this.

[@SaraSpalding]

@@LittleW00d the time source itself no, but the variable containing the reference will be

[@TheOneAndOnlyRavenMaster]

can you do visual code tutorial

[@unmecrandomquipassaitparla2835]

[@yusufbayram108]

Greetings SS

[@lukasnohejl603]

Please, return to ARPG series

[@SaraSpalding]

That series is finished, unless there's high demand for some particular perceived gap I'm probably not going to be touching it! especially considering how quickly gamemaker is changing and growing at the moment.