[HOWTO] How To: Quest Timer

[Tony Li]

Quest Machine has built-in quest timers. The Dialogue System, since it's focused more on dialogue, expects you to handle timers and such yourself. Someone recently asked how to do this, and I thought I'd post the answer here, too.

Let's say you have a quest to disarm a bomb before it blows up. The quest title is "Disarm Bomb", and it has a quest entry "Time left: MM:SS" where MM:SS is the countdown.

To implement this, in your database define a variable (or a custom field in your quest). This example assumes you've defined a variable named "secondsLeft". The quest entry text will look a little crazy, but it shows some of the power of the [lua(code)] tag:

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Time left: [lua(string.format("{0:0}:{1:00}", math.floor(Variable["secondsLeft"]/60), Variable["secondsLeft"] % 60))]

That will format the value of "secondsLeft" as MM:SS. Now you need a way to run the countdown. Use a script similar to this one:

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using UnityEngine;
using PixelCrushers.DialogueSystem;

public class TestTimedQuest : MonoBehaviour
{
    void Start()
    {
        InvokeRepeating("SubtractOneSecond", 1, 1);
    }

    void SubtractOneSecond()
    {
        var secondsLeft = DialogueLua.GetVariable("secondsLeft").AsInt;
        secondsLeft--;
        DialogueLua.SetVariable("secondsLeft", secondsLeft);
        DialogueManager.SendUpdateTracker(); // secondsLeft changed, so update quest tracker HUD.
        if (secondsLeft <= 0)
        {
            CancelInvoke();
            Debug.Log("BOOM!"); // Do something when timer reaches zero.
        }
    }
}