I think I've got it now. Thanks for your help!

I am hoping to make a game where people will follow along to the tempo of music and tap buttons at the same time that the notes are played.

Well, I read the dt tutorial again and used their example to do some testing. I created 3 textboxes and the following events:

<img src="http://i.imgur.com/4KekI.jpg" border="0" />

Which produced the following results.

<img src="http://i.imgur.com/SxkC1.jpg" border="0" />

You can see the timers which rely on "every tick" are in synch, whereas the one which relies on "every x seconds" is lagged (until the numbers from the right of the decimal carry over and then it catches up).

This was unexpected behavior for me. I guess I need a better understanding of frames. I am interested in this problem because I am creating a musical game where time is very important.

Thanks for the reply, 7Soul. I also suspected that dt might solve my problem. However, your suggestion gives me a continuous counter. I'm looking for a counter that increments by seconds. And I'm not sure why I would use the expression 1*dt. It seems redundant. Did you mean something else?

I'm curious as to why Every X Seconds doesn't work. Is it a realtime timer, or is it an approximation? I feel like I'm under some basic misapprehension.

I created an event like this using the System-Time expression:

Every 1 seconds set text to Time.

I thought this would create a textbox shows a value which increments every second (1,2,3...). But in practice, the textbox value has a lag and values are increasingly off (1.008, 2.013, 3.033...). Why is there a lag and why does it get worse and worse?

Thanks from a newbie.