11-24-08 - Lua Coroutines

.. are cool. Coroutines is the awesome way to do game logic that takes time. The script looks like :

PutRightFootIn();
PutRightFootOut();
if ( GetState(Friends) == dancing )
{
    DoHokeyPokey();
    TurnAround();
}
else
{
    LookAt( Friends );
    speech = StartSpeech("Screw you guys");
    FlipOff();
    WaitFor(speech);
    Go( Gome );
}

These things take various amounts of time and actually yield back execution to the game while that happens. Each NPC or game object has its own coroutine which the game basically just "pings". The Lua code really only ever runs a few lines, all it does is pick a new task and make the object do that task, and then it yields again. (obviously if it was just a static list like the example above you could do that easily other ways, the good thing about script is it can do conditionals and make decisions as it goes).

Coco lets you do a real Lua yield & resume from C calls, which lets you build your "threading" into your game's helper functions rather than relying on your designers to write scripts that yield correctly. LuaJIT (at the Coco link) is cool too.

I don't really like the Lua syntax, and I also personally hate untyped languages. (I think the right thing for scripting style languages is "weakly typed", that is all numeric types convert silenty and thing do their ToString and such, but I like to just get a compile error when I try to pass an alligator to the factorial function. Also having explicit types of "location" and "NPC" and such would be nice.) But having an off the shelf scripting language that does the coroutine thing is a pretty big win.

I generally think of simple game AI as being in 2 (or more) parts. The 2 main parts are the "brain" (or reactions) and the "job" (or task). The job/task is what the guy is currently doing and involves a plan over time and a sequence of actions. This is best done with a coroutine of some kind. The brain/reaction part is just a tick every frame that looks around and maybe changes the current task. eg. it's stuff like "saw the player, go into attack job". That can be well implemented as a regular Lua function call that the game just calls every frame, it should just do stuff that doesn't take any time and return immediately.