A clock that stops
Now, we’ll deal with this gated polling issue. The go-to solutions for this are Timers and Timelines. Timers provide a way to delay the calling of a function, but not in the same sense as the Delay node from Blueprint. The C++ backend for Delay nodes can be found in UKismetSystemLibrary
, where you will see that simply calling it is a bit of a hassle. Timers will perform a check on each frame they are active to see whether the function they point at should fire yet. This can be a useful behavior for dynamically set delays or systems where you only want a signal after a set amount of time, such as a countdown to decrease once per second instead of once per frame. Timelines, however, provide a way of processing a behavior, similar to an update while a curve is being queried. The length of these curves is predetermined, although the play speed of the Timeline can be altered to achieve a dynamic length. Timelines can also hold multiple types of tracks, which will...