Time

Timing is crucial to OpenBOR, as it is with most game engines. Understanding how the engine measures time, and how those measurements affect a project, is therefore essential. OpenBOR’s primary unit of time is the centisecond, or one hundredth of a second. Animation delays, for example, are expressed in centiseconds. Other units may be used depending on the feature, circumstance, or design requirement.

Time in OpenBOR is represented by three primary definitions:

Game Time – The traditional beat ’em up countdown timer that forces players to maintain pace or lose a life when time expires. Game Time is enabled by default, though creators may disable or remove it.

Elapsed Time – An integer value reset at the beginning of each active level and incremented during every engine update while the level remains active. Elapsed Time drives much of the engine’s internal timing, including animations, delays, effect duration, and other game-play processes.

Ticks – The number of milliseconds elapsed since the current game session began. Tick values are primarily used for timing operations outside active game-play, including loading processes and recorded player input.

OpenBOR also provides access to the host system clock for obtaining real-world dates and times. System clock access is entirely optional and does not affect native engine timing or game-play functionality.