I cant figure out how to get lua to do any common timing tricks, such as
-
sleep – stop all action on thread
-
pause/wait – don't go on to the next
command, but allow other code in the
application to continue -
block – don't go on to next command until the
current one returns
And I've read that a
while os.clock()<time_point do
--nothing
end
eats up CPU time.
Any suggestions? Is there an API call I'm missing?
UPDATE: I wrote this question a long time ago trying to get WOW Lua to replay actions on a schedule (i.e. stand, wait 1 sec, dance, wait 2 sec, sit. Without pauses, these happen almost all in the same quarter second.) As it turned out WOW had purposely disabled pretty much everything that allows doing action on a clock because it could break the game or enable bots. I figured to re-create a clock once it had been taken away, I'd have to do something crazy like create a work array (with an action and execution time) and then register an event handler on a bunch of common events, like mouse move, then in the even handler, process any action whose time had come. The event handler wouldn't actually happen every X milliseconds, but if it was happening every 2-100 ms, it would be close enough. Sadly I never tried it.
Best Answer
[I was going to post this as a comment on John Cromartie's post, but didn't realize you couldn't use formatting in a comment.]
I agree. Dropping it to a shell with os.execute() will definitely work but in general making shell calls is expensive. Wrapping some C code will be much quicker at run-time. In C/C++ on a Linux system, you could use:
Then, in main, do:
where "L" is your lua_State. Then, in your Lua script called from C/C++, you can use your function by calling: