Updating elapsed time efficiently

[scunliffe]

In the puzzle game I'm working on I'd like to maintain an elapsed time clock shown to the user indicating how long they have been working on a particular puzzle.

e.g. 00:13:45 (thirteen minutes and fourty-five seconds)

I have no issues with the math to display the time, nor the APIs to render the text... my question is how to do this effectively?

e.g. I currently wired this up to run in my main update() loop however this therefore tries to run as frequently as it can but I only need it to run once per 1,000ms or in 1 frame (if running at 60fps)

Is there an API to only call something a "max" of once per "time period"?

[Shantred]

Is there any reason you couldn't just create a timer? You can loop it every 1000ms to update the time instead of directly putting it in the update loop.

[scunliffe]

I can.. in fact that was what I was going to resort to if I didn't find anything more applicable ;-)

I'm fairly new to Phaser so I was just trying to see if there was a "better" or built in way so that I'm not reinventing the wheel.