Blender’s Game Engine is set to work at a predefined Tickrate, which is the number of times the Logic Brick events are executed per second. In the default settings, it is equal to 60, so that during one real second there will be 60 “ticks”. It can be modified for a scene with the builder API using the method morse.builder.bpymorse.set_speed().
Warning
This method must be called at the top of your Builder script, before creating any component.
While the simulation is running, the Logic Bricks of each component will make regular calls to their default_action method. At this point the component will perform its task and update its internal data.
To run a component at a lower frequency some calls to default_action can be skipped by setting the frequency in the Game Logic Sensor or more conveniently specifying the desired frequency in the builder script (using morse.builder.abstractcomponent.AbstractComponent.frequency()). The real frequency the default_action is called can be computed using the properpy morse.core.object.Object.frequency().
At the moment, there is two strategies to handle time at the Morse level:
These different strategies are implemented in morse.core.morse_time.
The used strategy is selected at the builder level, through the method morse.builder.environment.Environment.set_time_strategy().
In the simulator itself, you can access to the simulated time via morse.core.blenderapi.persistantstorage().time.time. It returns the simulated time as the number of seconds (in float) since Epoch, as done by time.time(). More precisely, at startup, the simulated is initialized with time.time() and then progress depending of the selected strategy. The precision depends of the underlaying implementation of time.time() and the speed of simulation. If you runs a simulation at 60 Hz, the simulator clock will be upgraded about every 15 ms.
Note
The variable py:data:morse.core.blenderapi.persistantstorage().current_time still exists, for compatibility purpose, but will be removed in the future.
Moreover, in a lot of situations, you do not want to access directly to the simulated time, but at the time as seen by the current robot. To do that, you must call the method morse.core.robot.Robot.gettime(). It allows to add different modifiers for different robots, triggering all the nice temporal issues you must address in multi-robot situations. The Clock allows to expose the time, as seen by a specific robot.
Last, a set of services in morse.services.time_services allows to retrieve the simulated time and various statistics about it.