Too many timers? What's your opinion?

j75

I just read an interesting thread that I wish I would have ran across earlier.
http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/44707/timers-are-for-chumps-gs-optimization-tips

After reading this, my question is, how many timer behaviors do you consider too many?

Socks

1

Braydon_SFX

Honestly, I probably have 15-20 timers in each app, sometimes more. Having said that, all of my apps run fine on latest devices as well as older ones.

j75

@Socks said:
1

lol

j75

I usually have 10-20 also. My current project has about 30 so far and more to come. I'm wondering if I will run into issues as the game progresses. I'm also curious if it is worth my time to eliminate most of them, or if 40-50 timers firing at different times throughout the game is enough to cause issues.
I don't know how others build their games so maybe that thread is referring top people who have 100+ timers???

jamie_c

If they fire at different times and not all at once I suspect you'd be fine.

Socks

@jamie_c said:
If they fire at different times and not all at once I suspect you'd be fine.

Yep ! Timers get a bad rap, but like you say unless they are all firing at once having lots is fine, in fact an 'after' timer is about as resource hungry as something like a change attribute behaviour in that it only fires once then gracefully retires. It's the 'every' timers that you probably don't want to have 140 of them firing at once.

Daftbomb

That was a great thread to read, I get the feeling that the discipline of creating those timers manually will be an essential learning step. I am really starting to feel the satisfaction of producing efficient, cohesive logic and taking pride in the job.

Are there any other valuable threads you guys would recommend to a beginner that will benefit them in the long run?