Why is the MessageDispatcher's delay in seconds ?

[JonathanGeoffroy]

According to the documentation, the MessageDispatcher can delay the message. The delay is always given in seconds.

However, some games could use another piece of time. For example, on turn-based game, time can be expressed in turns, not in seconds. So we could send a message in 3 turns for example.

Is there any reason to force the delay in seconds ? Could gdx-ai provide a more "generic way" to delay a message ?

[davebaol]

You can use immediate messages to implement turn based games. For instance, at the end of the turn a player might send a message to the next player.

[JonathanGeoffroy]

You're absolutely right: you can give a message to the next player by sending an immediate message. But in my mind, you should also send a message to tell players that an event will arrived in 5 turns.

The fact is each game could have it own definition of what is time, and how it spent. So lets take another example: simulation games (or more specifically City-building game for this example).

Imagine a game where, for each industry in your city, you'll win 1 gold every piece of time (example: every 4 seconds). Now what if you want manage the city speed ?

• If you double the city speed, you would like you're message arrive earlier (in the example, every 2 seconds), but you have to divide the delay by 2 for every future messages ... Moreover, messages has already waiting, so you can't change there delay !
• if you pause the city, message should be stopped ...

In this example, managing delay is simpler if you master how the time is spent : you don't have to change all messages delay, but just the MessageDispatcher ; I'm sure there are many examples where strategy would be simpler to write if you master it ...

By the way, my needs is maybe too specific ? I can try to create a generic MessageDispatcher that fit my needs ; would you mind if I send you a Gist if I succeed ? This is maybe the best way to make my speech understandable.

Regards.

[davebaol]

ok