How do I create a timer for my game?

Question

I am building a game in Android 2.2 but I'm struggling to be able to show a timer on screen during play and saving the time to a Leaderboard upon Game Over.

I have a game loop and I've extended the SurfaceView to show my graphics.

I don't think my game loop runs accurately every millisecond so I'm finding it difficult to grab the time.

I want to get to having a stored variable called time storing the milliseconds and a method called getFormattedTime() which would get the time as Minutes:Seconds:Milliseconds

Whats the best way to do this?

Answer 1

You can get the current time in milliseconds since January 1, 1970 by calling System.currentTimeMillis() . You can then take a difference between a stored value and a new currenTimeMillis to determine the amount of milliseconds that have passed.

Answer 2

Try the above if not getting as you wished you can try this but its rounding around

Calendar c = Calendar.getInstance(); 
int seconds = c.get(Calendar.SECOND);
int min= c.get(Calendar.MINUTE);
String time=min+":"+seconds

Answer 3

I've resolved this myself by creating a Timer and TimerTask and using these as a separate loop for timekeeping purposes. Thanks to all for your help anyway.

Answer 4

There is a class named TimerTask in Java. It allows to perform the activity on certain period of interval. You can use this class to create a timer for your game application.