How to delay a part of my program without affecting the rest?

Question

I have a program in which I utilize a score counter. That score counter is initially 100 and stays like that until a certain threshold is crossed. The threshold variable is called shipy and my score is called score.

I implemented something that subtracts 1 from my score every 0.1s once shipy is over 400, but doing it like that causes my whole program to run slower.

Here a snippet of my code:

shipy = 0
score = 100

# some code here doing something, eg. counting shipy up

if shipy > 400:
    time.sleep(0.1)
    global score
    score-=1

# more code doing something else

Is there a way to run that score subtraction independently of the rest of the code?

Answer 1

You need to use a different thread for your score calculation. Just start a new thread for counting down your score.

import threading
import time

def scoreCounter(): 
    while shipy > 400:
        time.sleep(0.1)
        global score
        score-=1

t1 = threading.Thread(target=scoreCounter) 

Then just call t1.start() at some point in the code if shipy > 400.