Is there any way to set a trigger that will start a timer when it fires?
And while I'm asking you learned smarties to show off, is there any way to check that progressively? Or have it send a little message "Timing thingy is half over!" or whatever?
Depends what you want the timer to do. There are quite a few ways of doing it.
Set the trigger to "send to script" and in the script you could do this:
DoAfterNote 10, "Time's up!"
This will make a note (a message only you see) after 10 seconds.
You can also use DoAfter (to send to the MUD) or DoAfterSpecial (to send to anywhere, eg. scripting).
For more complex requirements you can use AddTimer.
As for checking it progressively, well you probably need a second timer for that. :)
A simple half-way message could be done like this:
DoAfterNote 5, "Half-way"
DoAfterNote 10, "Time's up!"
That is, one message after 5 seconds, another after 10 seconds.
For more detail you could have a second timer that fires (say, every 5 seconds). This would need to keep firing (ie. use AddTimer and make it an "every x second" timer).
The second timer can use GetTimerInfo, selector 13, to get the number of seconds that the first timer has to go, and then display that.
Then when the second timer finds the first has fired, or disappeared, or whatever, it can delete itself.