What Is the Correct Way to Perform Action Periodically?

[culater]

What would you say is the best way to perform an action periodically?
For instance - write to log "message1" every 0.5 seconds and "message2" every 4 seconds.
The obvious ways I could think of were:

• Make a scheduler thread that times everything itself, but I'm afraid turbohud may be in an undefined state if not accessed from a callback.
• Add my code to an existing callback that happens often, for instance "aftercollect", and check the times there, but I'm afraid it might be too inaccurate.

Is there any elegant solution I'm not aware/thinking of?

[Razorfish]

That kind of programming is not really my forte (I just learn as I go), but I've seen other plugin writers go the route of using separate threads to execute timed commands. They usually bump into the issue of getting concurrency errors when inevitably their thread tries to access TH data that is in the process of being updated. If your timed command needs to evaluate the current state of the game, your actions really should wait until AfterCollect() to execute anyway. I can't think of anything that needs the kind of accuracy you're concerned about. What sort of scenario are you thinking of?