Pause Until‐Using Pause If to Prevent Achievement Processing Until Some Condition is Met

Sometimes it will be very difficult to identify an on-going timing for when to processing hit counts or other hit-related events. Or, there are a lot of conditions for when something might look valid, but not be valid. This situation may lead to convoluted logic in order to guard against invalid hit counts. One method to mitigate this is a Pause Until:

Basic Construction of the "Pause Until"

ID	Flag	Type	Memory	Cmp	Type	Mem/Val	Hits
1	And Next	Delta	0xSTATE	=	Value	VALUE_A	0 (0)
2	Reset Next If	Mem	0xSTATE	=	Value	VALUE_B	1 (0)
3	Pause If	Value	1	=	Value	1	0 (0)

Explanation of Conditions:

• 1-2: This transition from VALUE_A to VALUE_B may mark the 'start of game/level/sequence' definitively, however VALUE_B may not definitively identify the 'in-game/in-level/in-sequence' that you care about for the challenge. The Reset Next If here will latch to true upon this transition and suppressed the "always-true" Pause If in the following condition, allowing the rest of the logic to be processed. The single hit target here is important for this to function properly.
• 3: This Pause If condition will always be true. That is, unless the Reset Next If before it is latched to 'true' but receiving a hit towards its target of 1 hit! That's what makes this a "Pause Until" structure: The group is paused until the Reset Next If occurs.

An Example of Logic towards an Achievement

Suppose our actual goal is to "Complete Game/Level/Sequence in under X units of time without losing health."

ID	Flag	Type	Memory	Cmp	Type	Mem/Val	Hits
3		Delta	0xCOMPLETE_FLAG	=	Value	0	0 (0)
4	Trigger	Mem	0xCOMPLETE_FLAG	=	Value	1	0 (0)

In place of conditions 3 and 4 here you would use whatever logic definitively identifies the completion of the challenge you are constructing. This is just one example of a set of conditions you might have to identify the completion of the challenge.

ID	Flag	Type	Memory	Cmp	Type	Mem/Val	Hits
5	Reset If	Mem	0xHEALTH	<	Delta	0xHEALTH	0 (0)
6	Reset If	Value	0	=	Value	0x0	NUM_FRAMES_EQUAL_TO_TIME_X (0)

Here, either Reset If statement will remove the hit from the Reset Next If and result in the achievement becoming Paused, preventing timing hits from accruing until the game/level/sequence start transition happens again. Because the group is paused until the challenge starts, the timer reset will never falsely accrue hits outside of the challenge.

Something To Keep In Mind

There will rarely be a time where this structure is needed. Usually the developer should be able to find some conditions to join with the timer or other counter (using the And Next flag, etc) in order to restrict them to a specific window, along with any other resets needed to clear the counter hits to zero for other failure cases.