My brain hurts

["Paul Tankard" <Paul.Tankard@...>]

 Hello fellow Luarers :),
 
 I have spent the last few weeks ploughing through the Lua mail archives (big
 as it is) and doing general research on the net to do what a mass majority
 of people seem to be wanting to do now, and thats impliment Lua as part of
 my game entities to control them, now the first thing I did with Lua is to
 use it as a configuration processor which it seems to do lovingly out of the
 box, however, before I delve in making the mistake of trying to impliment
 Lua incorrectly for my game needs I thought I would chuck some questions
 into the melting pot to clarify things as my brain is now at melting point.
 
 Firstly, my system basic needs are to apply a script for each entity which
 in turn controls that entity.. seems simple enough.. but I do however want
 each entity to beable to reference each other... so the first implementation
 I thought of was.....
 
 have a main luavm, register all functions to it, then for each entity have a
 lua_newthread and do a lua_loadbuffer to the newthread with that particular
 script... now my head started melting when I thought of the calling process
 to the Lua script, I mean if I had a few threads each using a script which
 contained a function of the same name, say initialise, could I do a
 lua_getglobal in that particular newthread for "initialise" then a lua_call
 and it would call the corrects scripts function, or does it get set
 globally-globally so any script that has a function named the same will
 override the previous declaration like you would do function=nil to remove
 it ? this is obviously not the ideal way to do this.. especially if I have
 lots of entities that share the same script as it's using unnecessary
 overhead, but it would work ;)
 
 secondly I could have functions defined in tables then creating an object
 and using self everywhere this would make sure I don't have repeated chunks
 of script code and make it more c++ class orientated, but the problem is
 creating the actual object from C/C++, I mean would I just purge all scripts
 I needed into one script file then do lua_loadbuffer to the main lua state,
 and then for each entity do something like lua_dostring("entity1 =
 createentity:new("blah")); and get the function from the table of entity1
 and call that etc.
 
 or is there some other generic way that I'm just missing ? the more I'm
 having to think about it the more my head hurts so any feedback is more than
 welcome :)
 
 also, does anyone know of a windows tool/util that will take a list of mails
 (namely lua-l-archive) and process it to news format ? it's bloody damn hard
 having to spend time searching for stuff for examples when you don't know
 what to search for in the first place... it's kind of like using MSDN ;)
 
 cheers,
 
 PT