so I'm making a game that uses nothing but the console in my java IDE, but I have a problem using delays. My goal is to create a method that when taken a text passed though the parameters, it prints it letter by letter with a delay of 50. (Kind of like the text in the Pokemon series, how it scrolls though each letter).
The problem I have is lag. I'm running an amd fx-8350 cpu (4GHz, 4 cores+4 virtual cores). Whenever I change the delay amount to anything around and under 100 milliseconds, the console prints half a word, then a little bit of the other half, then half the sentence, then maybe a character, etc.
I've tried this code here (it works, but with lag):
public void scroll(String text){
int delay = 50;
ActionListener action = new ActionListener()
{
int counter = text.length();
@Override
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent event)
{
if(counter == 0)
{
timer.stop();
}
else
{
System.out.print(text.substring(text.length() - counter, ((text.length() - counter) + 1)));
counter--;
}
}
};
timer = new Timer(delay, action);
timer.start();
}//end scroll
And this code as well (also works, with same amount of lag):
public void scroll(String text){
for(int i = 0; i <= text.length(); i++){
try {
Thread.sleep(1000);
}catch(InterruptedException ex){
Thread.currentThread().interrupt();
}
System.out.print(text.substring(i, i + 1));
}
}//end scroll
In conclusion, I'm guessing that the computer is doing more than "delaying" when I try to delay the thread. Any idea's?
-Thanks, Eric
Firstly, some random notes about your code. This is wrong:
for(int i = 0; i <= text.length(); i++){
Whether you are iterating through a string, array, list, or whatever, the usual pattern is always
i = 0; i < length; i++
i.e. by using <= you are getting an exception. This is unneeded:
text.substring(i, i + 1)
and it looks even worse in the first example. You can use text.charAr(i).
I tried this code as an alternative:
for(int i = 0; i < text.length(); i++) {
long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
while (System.currentTimeMillis() - start < 50) {
}
System.out.print(text.charAt(i));
}
It still didn't work in IntelliJ. However it and your code work fine in the terminal, so I think IntelliJ just doesn't like printing immediately. flush makes no difference but its documentation in OutputStream hints at what might be happening:
If the intended destination of this stream is an abstraction provided by the underlying operating system, for example a file, then flushing the stream guarantees only that bytes previously written to the stream are passed to the operating system for writing; it does not guarantee that they are actually written to a physical device such as a disk drive.
So again, I think the IDE is the problem and it's out of the control of your code.