Overview

The ITimer interface exposes support for getting the current game time, and the current frame's delta time. This can be extremely useful when dealing with operations over time.

Getting the current time

To get the current time, use ITimer::GetCurrTime. This returns a CTimeValue object representing the time in seconds since game start. This can be used to determine the time between two events. For example:

void StoreTime()
{
  m_storedTime = gEnv->pTimer->GetCurrTime();
} 
 
void CheckTimePassed()
{
  // Now check time that has passed since stored
  if(gEnv->pTimer->GetCurrTime() - m_storedTime > 3.f)
  {
    CryLogAlways("Three seconds have passed");
  }
} 

Keep in mind that the current time is only updated once a frame, if you need to check the exact time at the current instant, use ITimer::GetAsyncTime. Note that this will query the time immediately, resulting in the function being much slower than ITimer::GetCurrTime.

Getting the delta/frame time

Most update functions part of the engine will provide the frame time as a parameter, but in the case that it is not, you can call ITimer::GetFrameTime.

Time Scale

Time in the engine is multiplied by the t_scale CVar, allowing us to slow down or speed up game play. By default, the time scale is set to 1 (100%). To speed up the game, we could use:

t_scale 2

...Resulting in a 2x speed-up of game time, including every frame's delta. To retrieve the current time scale, see ITimer::GetTimeScale.

Conclusion

This concludes the article on Time. You may be interested in:

Logging