Lua API Exposed... Sort of.

I don't think IO is strictly necessary. Giving us a sandboxed way of "saving files" for state and an API for communicating with the server would work fine.

 

They could just do what garry did for garrysmod and have a custom IO wrapper that only allows people to read and write json and have it restricted to a directory. Would be nice, and could even have table -> json and json -> table functions too.

 

I already made table -> json function, maybe i will upload here my lua lib.

 

I would be interested in adding it to the Starbound Template Library.

 

Anyone found a way to expose the name of the planet you are on?

 

I really really like this idea!

As for getting data into the game, I'm not sure how great this would be. I could see having an external program writing one file, over and over, and having Starbound keep reading it. Having a more interrupt driven means of pulling data in would be a great complement.

Really hope we see some kind of way to linkup starbound with the external world make it's way into the available API. Great suggestion looter.

 

Nice work...

(I loled at the emotes )

 

is there any write variant of world.material yet that i dont find? you seem to be able to spawn most other things, i wonder why blocks are not in, or do i miss something ?

 

The Angry Koala patch has implemented placeMaterial. See the /assets/scripts/API directory for docs.

 

ah yes thanks. ive multi posted that request wrote more in the lua feature request topic by "looter" thanks man.

 

I'm looking into world.material, for the mod I am currently working on.

 

There's an args.dt that gives how much time has passed between function calls, check the energy dash tech for how it's used (it's used there to check how much time passes between keypresses).

 

Im using this in a main to execute only every 3s:

Code:

// in Init:
self.time_to = os.time();
local delay_in_s = 3
// in main (looped)
if(os.time() >= self.time_to) then
  do_stuff()
  self.time_to = os.time() + delay_in_s;
end

This is not a wait, it just cares for only execute this every 3s+x(depending on while loop time).
I triied doing it whith a while(time) instead of polling the if inside a thread (coroutine). The strange thing is that also this while is threaded the main loop of starbound also waits while the thread waits (player can move, but monsters "hang" for the timer ammount) ... thats kinda the thing you want about a thread, that it is in a different context with its own current execution pointer, no? anyway.

 

well that depends on what you want to do. your main will be called each cycle. if this is in main main will exit quite fast again. no big difference to not having it in at all. so it doesnt eat a lot of resources. it would be even better if you could have that timer in a thread holding a while. but that doesnt work at because the "sleeping" thread hold parts of starbounds main which is odd to me.

 

In the Unity game engine, when we want to do a timing effect in Update() (the same thing as this engine's Main function), we do this approach:

Code:

public void Update()
{
    if(Time.time < lastEvent)
        return;

    // ...Do what you were going to do...
}

This seems like the correct approach to take in the Starbound engine too.

Code:

function main()
  if ! canDoThingAgain then
    return;

  -- Do the things.
end

 

Well, do share..
More knowledge to the masses!

What was your method?