haXe : doing a regular update and NME

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This came to me as a surprise while trying to write a script, which can run in iOS, HTML5, Flash and Neko. I knew it can be done by cross-compiling through NME to all these target platforms. While this hold good almost in every case but when it comes to regular stage update or the ENTER_FRAME event, it is a problem.
Well, if you are a flash developer and depend on ENTER_FRAME event for a long time, then it may come to you as a surprise like me. The game loop as the gaming engines call it, now has to be worked upon. Fortunately we have a timer function in haXe and that quite fits the game.
Before going ahead in timer, lets see the unreliable nature of ENTER_FRAME for all targets. Firstly I was creating different circles in stage area with an ENTER_FRAME, while that worked well in all platforms, I thought its good to go for all. But then I tried to rely upon the same ENTER_FRAME event with a drag and drop and position change of the elements. Whoa!! That does not work! I stopped relying on the ENTER_FRAME event and changed that with Timer and everything is back in the action again.
The haXe timer code is a little different than Flash timer and the code looks as below.

var timer = new Timer(10); //10 is the time difference in milliseconds between the timer call
timer.run = onEachTimerTick;//its kind of event listener
function onEachTimerTick():Void {}

For me, ENTER_FRAME event only worked for Flash targets and nothing else. So be careful if you want to target other delivery methods.

Happy coding!

3 thoughts on “haXe : doing a regular update and NME”

  1. Hey, this might solve the issue I’m having…

    I was originally avoiding framerate dependency with the ENTER_FRAME event by using a Date timer, but then I found out that the Android / C++ implementations round down to seconds instead of milliseconds.

    Apparently neko.Sys.time(); gives me what I want, but its not available under my current build flags.

    So then… Timer()? might that solve my issue… investigating now.

  2. Update, this seems to work for me, using Timer.stamp();

    public var gametime:Int;
public var gametimeDiff:Float;
public var lastUpdateTime:Float;

var now:Float = Timer.stamp();
gametimeDiff = ((now - lastUpdateTime) * 30);
gametime = cast (gametime + Math.round(gametimeDiff * 1));
lastUpdateTime = now;

  3. Thanks John,
    thats a perfect way to update the screen at a particular interval.
    Have you seen the Actuate lib for tween animation, thats just to make the tweens, but thought it may help.

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