CoreClock

Made with <3 by Amazing Cow.

Websites:

General:

• Amazing Cow's page.
• Amazing Cow's Github.

Libs:

• Amazing Cow's Libs page.
• Amazing Cow's Libs Github.

Description:

CoreClock is a small library intended to easy the time tracking in games, but it general enough to be used in a myriad of situations.
It can be used to fire events after some time, giving a very flexible way to handle animations, callbacks and other stuff.

As usual, you are very welcomed to share and hack it.

Motivation:

In some games we need to perform some operation repeatedly, or after some time.
So instead of messing with ivars to keep track of time and all other "low-level" stuff we decide to create the CoreClock class to keep it very encapsulated.

Examples:

Let's imagine a scenario that we want to trigger some operation 3 times with 1 second between them. This will let us appreciate how CoreClock will ease our lives.

One possible implementation could be:

///////////////////////////
//In SomeClass.h         //
///////////////////////////
float m_timeSinceLastTick;
float m_timeToTick; 
float m_repeatTickCount;


///////////////////////////
//In SomeClass.cpp       //
///////////////////////////
void SomeClass::initClock()
{
    m_timeSinceLastTick = 0;
    m_timeToTick        = 1000; //Milliseconds...
    m_repeatTickCount   = 3;    //We gonna decrement it...
}

void SomeClass::update(float dt)
{
    //This is straightforward, but we don't like to have to 
    //do this every time that we need a timer of some sort.
    m_timeSinceLastTick += dt;
    if(m_repeatTickCount > 0 && m_timeSinceLastTick >= m_timeToTick)
    {
        m_timeSinceLastUpdate -= m_timeToTick;
        
        this->doSomethingCool(); //Trigger the tick action.

        --m_repeatTickCount;
    }
}

We find this very, very cumbersome, not clear, ugly...

With CoreClock:

/////////////////////////
//In SomeClass.h       //
/////////////////////////
CoreClock::Clock m_clock;
...

///////////////////////////
//In SomeClass.cpp       //
///////////////////////////
void SomeClass::initClock()
{
    m_clock.setInterval(1000); //Ms, but can be anything that you like.
    m_clock.setRepeatCount(3);
    
    //This can be a lambda, a Functor etc...
    m_clock.setCallback(std::bind(&SomeClass::doSomethingCool,this));

    m_clock.start();
}

void SomeClass::update(float dt)
{
    //Clock will ignore updates after 3 ticks...
    m_clock.update(dt);
}

Much more easier hun???

Building:

CoreClock is intended to be include as source in your project.
So to use it, just grab the whole CoreClock directory, put it in your project and setup the include paths in the compiler.

As example, let's imagine that you are copying it to a directory called libs. In your build script you need to do just the following:

g++ -I /path/to/libs/CoreClock \
    ... Other stuff ...        \
    /path/to/libs/CoreClock/CoreClock/src/Clock.cpp 

Documentation:

We strive to make our source code fully documented.
While there are a myriad of comments, one might find useful take a look at:

• Doxygen Docs.

Anyway if you didn't understand something let us know sending a mail to
help_floss@amazingcow.com with the subject filled with the name of this repo.

Dependencies:

There is no dependency for CoreClock.

License:

This software is proudly released under GPLv3.

BUGS:

We strive to make all our code the most bug-free as possible - But we know that few of them can pass without we notice ;).

Please if you find any bug report to bugs_floss@amazingcow.com with the name of this project and/or create an issue here in Github.

TODO:

Check the TODO file for general things.

This projects uses the COWTODO tags.
So install cowtodo and run:

$ cd path/to/the/project
$ cowtodo 

That's gonna give you all things to do :D.

Others:

Check our other Free Software repos and take a look at our free software site.