Re: stage management in games

["Adam D. Moss" <adam@...>]

ted wrote:
> I would like to be able to write a script for my game to stage manage the
> characters. Something like:
>
> ogre = monster("Eric")
>
> ogre:WalkTo(30, 40)
>
> ogre:Say("HelloWorld")
>
> The trouble is, with something like this the rest of my game will pause
> until Eric's said his line. Is there a way each agent can call a script like
> this, which will do a frame's worth of logic and then hand back control so
> that everything else in the game can be updated too?

You probably want to look into Lua5's (possible-underdocumented)
coroutines.

With these you can manually yield a thread of control at
particular points (say within your Ogre logic) and resume
at a later time (say, the next frame).  Coroutines are useful
for 'hand-scheduling' stuff as well as funky things like
marvellous iterators and the ever-popular state machines
(along the lines of your requirements).

--Adam
--
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