How to not stop coroutines when deactivating a GameObject

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Hi,

We pause our game by deactivating all gameobjects in the scene and then displaying a menu. This works great, except that any coroutines running on those gameobjects are stopped. Is there a workaround for this short of basically writing my own coroutine system?

Also: what is the logic behind stopping coroutines when a gameobject is deactivated? Why would you want to make such a drastic state alteration on an object if you only want to temporarily disable it?

Answer 1

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Answer by Fattie · Mar 19, 2015 at 08:38 AM

The answer is just disable the script, not the whole game object.

For InvokeRepeating...

1) disable whole game object - InvokeRepeating does NOT stop

2) disable just the script component - InvokeRepeating does NOT stop

For coroutines...

3) disable whole game object - coroutine >>> DOES <<< stop

4) disable just the script component - coroutine does NOT stop

In all four cases, the repeat is "eliminated", it is NOT paused. If you again SetActive(true), in all four cases, the repeat does NOT continue where it left off.

Simply use OnDisble(), OnEnable() and the similar routines if you want custom behaviour on disabling.

Details here.

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Answer 2

Answer by Sisso · Jun 24, 2013 at 04:31 PM

Coroutines serve the object and are dependent of object life cycle. If your coroutine need to run without your object, the courotine is in the wrong place.

By the way. Normaly, you use Time.timeScale = 0 to pause a game. Coroutine and yield WaitForSecond respect this value.

http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/ScriptReference/Time-timeScale.html

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raithza · Jun 24, 2013 at 04:40 PM 1

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If your coroutine need to run without your object, the courotine is in the wrong place.

I'm not expecting that - rather that the coroutine gets suspended until I re-activate the object

By the way. Normaly, you use Time.timeScale = 0 to pause a game.

Our menu's etc have a lot of animated components with particle effects etc so we can't use that. We also want to pause the game for small intermissions while the player plays a $$anonymous$$igame.

Sisso · Jun 24, 2013 at 04:58 PM 0

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The classic way is use set timeScale to 0 and player effects and other times stuff using realtime. But I don't think that will be your case.

The main problem is that you are disabling your objects to simulate a "pause". Even if you solve it, you could have new problems in the future. Search some alternative to pause without disable. Like recursively stop all animations, effects and create a custom yield like "while (isShowing$$anonymous$$enu) yield return 0;"

Other option is use a coroutine schedule like you said. I think that this could help you "http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/CoroutineScheduler".

Last thing that I see is store the state of coroutines when stop, and start again when you re-enable your objects.

lordpaladin44 · May 18, 2016 at 06:40 PM 1

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By the way, as an experienced Unity app developer, setting Time.timescale = 0 is a TERRIBLE design decision. The design decision has caused numerous troubles down the road, and we are constantly having to work around it. The main reason is that when your paused, you still may want to do flashy stuff on the screen.

How to not stop coroutines when deactivating a GameObject

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