Object-Oriented Python

13 Timers

This chapter is about timers. A timer allows your program to count or wait for a given amount of time before moving on to perform some other action. In the world of text-based Python programs, this is easily achieved with time.sleep() by specifying a number of seconds to sleep. To pause for two and a half seconds, you could write:

import time
time.sleep(2.5)

However, in the world of pygame, and event-driven programming in general, the user should always be able to interact with the program, so pausing in this way is inappropriate. A call to time.sleep() would make the program nonreactive during the sleeping period.

Instead, the ...