Set a timer for running a process, pause the timer under certain conditions

Question

I've got this program:

import multiprocessing
import time

def timer(sleepTime):
    time.sleep(sleepTime)
    fooProcess.terminate()
    fooProcess.join() #line said to "cleanup", not sure if it is required, refer to goo.gl/Qes6KX

def foo():
    i=0
    while 1 
        print i
        time.sleep(1)
        i
        if i==4:
            #pause timerProcess for X seconds

fooProcess = multiprocessing.Process(target=foo, name="Foo", args=())
timer()
fooProcess.start()

And as you can see in the comment, under certain conditions (in this example i has to be 4) the timer has to stop for a certain X time, while foo() keeps working. Now, how do I implement this?

N.B.: this code is just an example, the point is that I want to pause a process under certain conditions for a certain amount of time.

Answer 1

I am think you're going about this wrong for game design. Games always (no exceptions come to mind) use a primary event loop controlled in software.

Each time through the loop you check the time and fire off all the necessary events based on how much time has elapsed. At the end of the loop you sleep only as long as necessary before you got the next timer or event or refresh or ai check or other state change.

This gives you the best performance regarding lag, consistency, predictability, and other timing features that matter in games.