Thread: running in real time

Hey guys,

I'm working on a program wherein the main function of my program is a tautological while loop which repeatedly gets input from the user and displays the appropriate output... and I'm interested in getting it to run in real time. I was wondering if anybody had any tips on how to do this?

I had thought about possibly trying a loop which would run every .25 seconds, but I don't think that would work with typing input (right now I'm using fgets). I'm completely stumped. Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance.

what does the user input to do with running in real-time? No user is able to provide an input with the speed of the CPU.

could you explain better what you want to achieve?

I'm going to borrow the "Hat of Guessing" and guess that you are trying to make "non-waiting input", by which I mean that I think you want to read input from the user without waiting for enter.

If so, there are a few ways to do that, and which one is the "right" one depends on what OS you are using.

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Mats

Appears that the "Hat of Guessing" was working today. Wohoo!

In either case, there are two solutions:
1. You use some sort of "non-waiting input", which is what I originally suggested.
2. Use multiple threads. Have one thread deal with user input, and another thread (or two) deal with monsters and players attacking each other, obviously using the user input when available, but only the "wait for user input" will be waiting for the input from the user.

Both methods gets rather complicated rather quickly, as you probably still want to output the players and monsters fight, whilst waiting for the input, which in turn means that you need to "repaint" the question for the user.

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Mats

Originally Posted by arpsmack

Ahh its so much clearer now. Non-blocking IO is pretty common in games I suppose.

I've done this before using functions in conio.h, and low and behold, a quick google search for "non-blocking console io" turned up references to conio.h and specifically the kbhit() function.

conio.h is a "Borland special" [although some others have implemented "compatibility" libraries]. However, if you are going to use unportable functions, it's probably better to use a more modern solution.

I'm pretty sure the FAQ has an entry for "How do I read input without waiting for Enter" or something very close to that title.

There are certainly also several threads on the same subject.

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Mats

Originally Posted by rogster001

maybe you could just give the user a reponse timelimit, if it is exceeded the program is free to go and do something (like you have missed a turn i suppose) then it is the users chance again to respond, you could mix up these response timelimits to give the effect of suddenly being attacked or suddenly spotting something then having to deal with it pronto. (the user is not informed of these time limits unless you wanted to do that to create 'pressure')

But this still assumes that you have a way to "continue" from a fgets() or similar function.

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Mats