making a wait in milliseconds function?

[ICANSEEYOU7687]

For my class I have to make the game snake. And I have the snake drawing with linked lists correctly and it all works pretty well except it draws everything way too fast.... By the way this is in C, not C++

So I need some sort of wait function... I found
void wait ( int seconds ){
clock_t endwait;
endwait = clock () + seconds * CLOCKS_PER_SEC ;
while (clock() < endwait) {}
}


on the site, but could not get it to work.And I included stdlib and time.h.
But im not that great of a programmer, so if someone could help me with this function I think I got the rest of the homework down.

thanks!

[demosthenes2k8]

If it's for windows you could try Sleep(); inside windows.h

but if you're sane, then you'll want to make sure that CLOCKS_PER_SEC is valid (should be 1000 IIRC)

Post your errors?

[ICANSEEYOU7687]

I tried including windows.h

#include <windows.h>
and it says it cant find it....

maybe its cause we are using eclipse and not visual studios?

[helios]

then you'll want to make sure that CLOCKS_PER_SEC is valid

What? How could it not be valid? I guess if it was zero or negative, but the function should work for any positive value of CLOCKS_PER_SEC. And what the hell kind of implementation would have CLOCKS_PER_SEC<=0?

ICANSEEYOU7687: You are using Windows, right? Not Linux? Because that header, as its name suggests, only exists for Windows. Other than that, I don't know what could be failing. Every compiler for Windows except Cygwin comes with windows.h. Maybe you need to set your compiler search paths manually with Eclipse?

[demosthenes2k8]

A screwed up implementation

Again, error messages would be helpful.

[ICANSEEYOU7687]

yes im using windows, haha windows 7 actually.

But if I cannot get this to work, I may just make a count function, and make an if statement that says something like...

If(count % 3 == 0){
drawsnake()
}

etc....

so only every 3 cycles it would draw the snake.

[Mythios]

Make a new program - see if something like this works. It could possibly be you're calling something in the wrong spot.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>

void wait ( int seconds )
{
	clock_t endwait;
	endwait = clock () + seconds * CLOCKS_PER_SEC ;
	while (clock() < endwait) {}
}

int main()
{
	for( int i = 0; i < 10; i++ )
	{
		static int foo = 0;
		printf("Waiting ... %d\n", foo);
		foo++;

		wait(1);
	}

	return 0;
}

[Duthomhas]

The problem with that delay function is that it spends clock cycles.

Unless you have good reason not to, use the OS forms to delay:
http://www.cplusplus.com/forum/unices/10491/page1.html#msg49054

And, FWIW, "wait" is a really bad name for a function, because it might already be used elsewhere.

Hope this helps.

[demosthenes2k8]

Erm...couldn't you just get rid of foo and use the value i from the for loop?