Objective

Main objective of this blog post is to give you a brief idea on how to use WaitUntil & WaitWhile in your project.

 

 

Step 1 Concept of WaitUntil & WaitWhile in Unity

Getting confused with WaitUntil & WaitWhile?

Don’t know how to use WaitUntil & WaitWhile?

If that’s the case, then I’m at your service.

I assume you already know about coroutines before reading this blog post, as WaitUntil and WaitWhile works only with a yield statement in coroutines.

If not, then have a look here:

 

Step 2 Understand about WaitUntil

  • By definition, it holds back the execution until the condition gets true.
  • In other words, it will not continue the execution when our condition has a false value. Unity will wait for the condition to get a true value to continue execution.

Okay, I got the Idea. What next?

Now we’ll move on to a simple demo so that you know how and where to use it.

Say you are developing a car racing game and you want to give a notification to player as soon as the tank gets empty.

For that case, check out following code:

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

public class Demo : MonoBehaviour {

    public int counter;

    void Start() {
        counter = 20;
        StartCoroutine(FuelNotification());
    }
    
    IEnumerator FuelNotification() {
        Debug.Log("Waiting for tank to get empty");

        yield return new WaitUntil(()=> counter <= 0);

        Debug.Log("Tank Empty!"); //Notification
    }

    void Update() {
        if (counter > 0)
        {
            Debug.Log("Fuel Level: " + counter);
            counter--;
        }
    }
}

When counter becomes zero, player will get the notification. And until then console will display fuel level.

WaitUntil Console

Pretty simple, isn’t it?

Yeah! But what is this mysterious “() =>” thing with our WaitUntil?

Well, I was expecting that question from you.

That thing is called A Lambda expression. (Only => part, not the parentheses)

It is an Anonymous method (another C# concept) which implicitly gets the info about the variable passed with it. It is mostly used in LINQ expressions.

Lambda expression is a very convenient tool, give it a try. See how that works here:

However, if that messes up your head, we’ve another way for doing things:

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

public class Demo : MonoBehaviour {

    public int counter;

    void Start() {
        counter = 20;
        StartCoroutine(FuelNotification());
    }

    IEnumerator FuelNotification() {
        Debug.Log("Waiting for tank to get empty");

        yield return new WaitUntil(IsTankEmpty);

        Debug.Log("Tank Empty!");
    }

    void Update() {
        if (counter > 0)
        {
            Debug.Log("Fuel Level: " + counter);
            counter--;
        }
    }

    public bool IsTankEmpty(){
        if(counter>0){ return false; }
        else { return true; }
    }
} 

Check console; output is the same, right?

Got the point? A whole method in just one line, see how powerful a Lambda Expression is.

I hope that cleared your thoughts on WaitUntil.

 

Step 3 Understand about WaitWhile

  • WaitWhile is the opposite of WaitUntil.
  • It holds back the execution while the condition is true.
  • Unlike WaitUntil, it will wait for the condition to get a false value to execute next code block.

The same example as before using WaitWhile would be as following:

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

public class Demo : MonoBehaviour {

public int counter;

    void Start() {
        counter = 20;
        StartCoroutine(FuelNotification());
    }
    
    IEnumerator FuelNotification() {
        Debug.Log("Waiting for tank to get empty");

        yield return new WaitWhile(()=> counter > 0);

        Debug.Log("Tank Empty!");
    }

    void Update() {
        if (counter > 0)
        {
            Debug.Log("Fuel Level: " + counter);
            counter--;
        }
    }
} 

As you can see, only the mechanism of dealing with conditions is different. Rest is the same.

 

Step 4 Conclusion

But keep in mind that using these concepts is like a double edged sword.

If your calculations are huge, this will slow down your game’s performance as these functions are called in each frame.

With this, I would like to end this post on WaitUntil & WaitWhile.

If you still find anything in this post confusing, drop a comment below.

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An Addictive Gamer turned into a Professional Game Developer. I work with Unity Engine. Part of TheAppGuruz Team. Ready to take on Challenging Games & increase my knowledge about Game Development.

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