Hi Folks.

First of all, I'd like to thank Jim Benson for the great Morphic tutorials
he's been posting.  Very entertaining Jim!  And I've learned some stuff too
(this is always a Good Thing).  Please keep submitting these -- your running
dialog has been sparking ideas my brainpan.  :-)

And now on to the subject of the evening:  Timers

I have found it both useful and problematic that the World (PasteUpMorph)
controls all of the time-related activities of my morphs.  On one hand, it
is very useful for a World to control the stepping events for its subMorphs.
This makes for cool drawing demos (the car & the steering wheel),
ClockMorph, etc.  But on the other hand, on slower machines, I find that
rich Worlds (Worlds with lots of step driven automation) tend to slooooowwww
down as you add more and more morphs to them (try creating a dozen or so
blob morphs on a World -- I dare you!).  This becomes a problem for me,
because I am (trying) to create a Morphic game that has lots of animated
morphs (currently step driven).  The more morphs I add to my World, the
slower the response time of my game pieces!

At first blush, I thought I'd just have to turn the game pieces into drawn
artifacts.  In other words, I would have to stop using Morphs to represent
my game pieces and instead try to manipulate a gameboard bitmap (like the
Game of Life that Dan Ingalls posted a short time ago).  And then I shook my
head.  I WANT them to be Morphs.  Morphs are great!  They know how to draw
themselves and they have all kinds of other useful logic.  There has got to
be a better way to solve this problem...

At this point, I remembered VSE's Timer class.  In VSE, Timer is a subclass
of EventManager.  You can create Timer instances at will and your model can
update your GUI based on timer ticks.  They sound a lot like the stepper
mechanism in PasteUpMorph.

Question:  Does it make sense to implement a generic Timer class so that the
World, and other interested parties, might instantiate their own timers to
trigger events to other objects?  I think this may help me solve my problem
(but I'm not sure; I've never written an animated game before).

Thanks for your thoughts!

---==> Chris