Frame rate goes crazy with editable text sprite

Question

This one is annoying - I have a lot of things that depend on
a steady,
predictable frame rate. But whenever you have the mouse
button held down on
an editable text sprite, the frame rate goes through the
roof. I don't know
what the numbers are exactly, but everything runs MUCH faster
than it
should. This can result in some major timing mis-syncs for
other events
happening on the stage. It looks like the OS is taking over
or something
when you're selecting text on a text sprite. Is there any
easy way around
this? Or should I just try and keep editable text sprites
from being used
on the same frame as time-sensitive code? I'm thinking I
could maybe get
around it by making the sprite non-editable and changing the
text manually
based on keypresses, but that sounds like a lot of work to
basically
reinvent the wheel here for something that should just work,
you know?

Answer 1

> Bad idea.
>
> The Tempo channel sets the Maximum frame rate, but it
could be much less
> and
> throw things out of sync. Depends on what you are doing.
>
> You can use Timeout objects to do time-based animations
and completely
> forget
> about what the frame rate is. This is a far more robust
solution across
> varying
> computer systems.
>
> Personally I have not used an "enterframe" or
"exitframe" in over half a
> decade other than a single obligatory "go the frame"
behavior.
Well, what I do is something like:
global timeBase
on exitFrame
if the ticks - timeBase > 2 then
repeat while the ticks - timeBase > 2
timeBase = timeBase + 2
gameLoop()
end repeat
end if
end
So, even if the movie is lagging behind, the gameLoop()
executes at regular
intervals. If more than 2 ticks have passed between this
frame and the
previous, it will execute the gameLoop() script multiple
times in order to
catch up. All the important time-dependant stuff runs in
gameLoop().
This is not what the problem is, however. Most of my
animations on screen
are being shown as Film Loop sprites or in some cases
animated GIFs, and
these are what depend on the steady frameRate. If you click
on an editable
text object, the animations all suddenly speed up until you
release the
mouse button. I guess it's really more of an aesthetic thing
than anything
else, but it just looks really silly when everything suddenly
runs
super-fast just because you clicked on a text sprite.