Timer Node

Unity Visual Scripting provides a Timer Node implementation based on coroutines. In addition, we provide a Timer Node implementation based on asynchronous APIs. The following tutorials will introduce you to the use of the Timer Node step by step.

Step 1: Create a Timer

You could use the Timer Node to create a Timer object.

As shown in the figure, the Timer Node has five input ports.

• Target: Limits the scope of Timer, with the default value being the GameObject itself
• Event: The name of the Timer, which will be the unique identifier for this Timer
• Duration: The duration of the Timer, in milliseconds
• Delay: The time to wait before the first timing, in milliseconds
• Times: The number of times the Timer needs to run

When Times is set to -1, the Timer will loop indefinitely

As shown in the figure, This is a named 001 with a duration of 5000 ms, a delay of 0 ms before the first timing, and a repetition of 5 times.

As shown in the figure above, the Timer has the ability to pass parameters. You can control the number of parameters to be passed through the Arguments option at the header of the Timer Node, whit a maximum of 10.

The parameters passed can be of any type

At this point, we have successfully to created a Timer

Step 2: Listening Timer && Invoke Your Task

The implementation of the Timer Node relies on the Event mechanism of Unity Visual Scripting, so we only need to use the Custom Event node.

As shown in the figure, we use Custom Event Node to listen to the Timer named 001. Since the Timer 001 we just created passes 2 parameters, we need to set the number of parameters to receive in the header of the Custom Event Node to 2 as well. Finally execute your task. In this example, we add the two parameters passed by Timer and print result to the console. This task will execute every 5000 ms for a total of 5 times.

The output result of this example is shown in the following figure:

As you can see, the task execute every 5 s for a total of 5 times.

Invoke MultiTask

A single Timer can trigger multiple tasks simultaneously.

As shown in the figure, we added the second task in this graph: we use the first parameter minus the second parameter passed by Timer and print result to console. The result is as follows:

As you can see, both task were executed 5 times

Summary

So far, we have complete the whole process of using Timer Node to control the delayed startup tasks and periodic tasks.

Finally, as shown in the following figure, we complete and organize this sample.