Using while loop to wait?

Question

var lastRecordedTime:Number = getTimer();
while(getTimer()>lastRecordedTime+10000)
{

}

I want to put my game on a wait state. Should I use while loop like this or is there a more performance efficient way of doing this?

@rgettman Java is pretty similar to AS3 and while loops should be same in Java, right? — Joe Slater, Feb 26 '13 at 22:44
Loops can be very similar from language to language, but for example Java has `Thread.sleep` to wait a specific number of milliseconds without a while loop. — rgettman, Feb 26 '13 at 22:45
A similar question is answered [here](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3009929/action-script-sleep-function) — Floris, Feb 26 '13 at 22:46
possible duplicate of [actionscript 3 sleep?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5656706/actionscript-3-sleep) — Tim Bender, Feb 26 '13 at 22:47
The question I marked this as a duplicate of shows what I believe to be a better option as it uses a Timer and does not live wait. But either way, this is a duplicate. — Tim Bender, Feb 26 '13 at 22:50

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 26 '13 at 22:53

Never use an approach like this in AS3. AS3 has a serious shortcoming in that it doesn't support multi-threading. This crashes the program completely as long as that timer keeps running, and Windows 7 in particular will freak out if the user keeps trying to click it or something.

Try this:

private var m_tmr:Timer = new Timer(10000, 1);

.
.
.

private function func():void
{
    .
    .
    .
    m_tmr.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, tick);
    m_tmr.start();
}

private function tick(pEvent:TimerEvent):void
{
    // pick back up in here
}

The only thing about this is that it's asynchronous, so you might have to add some special logic to ignore certain types of events and stuff in the meantime, depending on what you're trying to accomplish. But using a while loop to just sleep the thread isn't going to work out in AS3.

I agree w/the answer, but perhaps "thrashes" is a better choice of words instead of "crashes" ;) Since the code we write in Flash is single threaded (aside from the new Actionscript workers), the while loop will just tie up the only thread and should make all browsers eventually complain if it's tied up for too long. — Sunil D., Feb 26 '13 at 23:23

Using while loop to wait?

1 Answers1