Alright, so in my mod I am implementing a block that disappears for 5 secs then reappears(sorta like the portable hole) does anyone know how to make a Thread that can do this wwithout freezing the game?

do you a) mean completely disappear (destroyed from world) and then the block is recreated back at that position in 5 seconds or

 

b) disappears but the block is still there just invisible with no collision box.

b

well, another "waiting" topic

 

read this:

http://www.minecraftforge.net/forum/index.php/topic,5964.0.html

^whole topic, there are two approaches to this problem

 

it would be possible to do this via threads, but you'd have to manage synchronization. also spawning thread for each block/group of blocks just to put them to sleep doesn't seem right, when you can do the same with tick handler without overhead from the threads creation.

I don't know how to do this with just a block, but if you're willing to have a tile entity then you can simply use the updateEntity() method to increment a timer with every tick. 20 ticks = 1 second, so it would reappear after the timer reached 100. The actual change could be handled with metadata, where 0 is normal and 1 is invisible/non-collidable.

@nerdboy64 that sounds considerably easier to implement than using threads or custom queue/calendar. also using TEs' NBT tags for saves is a nice and easy, definitely better than going over all the threads and signalizing them to stop waiting and to send the main thread remaining time...