Some Plugins (Page 2 of 3)

Random question I'm going to cross post on my github mirror thread.

I really think that I would like to host builds of the community branch and plugins so we can get a wider user base who can't/don't want to compile it all themselves. Unfortunately my only dev machine I have available is my macbook right now, as my other boxes are in various stages of dissolution while I rebuild/reformat/repurpose them.

Would there be anyone interested in supporting me with this by helping to create builds? I can provide an FTP account and the hosting, all that would be required would be the occasional building of the plugins and uploading to the FTP. Anything else, such as posting bugs/issues to github and fixing platform specific issues would be nice, but hopefully can be picked up if more people get access to the builds anyway.

Can you please check that you've definitely updated everything. The issue is currently that MScript{,Ext}::startCallFunction will throw this error if you try to call something like player.update when no player class exists. I _thought_ I fixed when this occurs, but I really need to find how I can do error checking on lua_getglobal and lua_getfield, which are the cause of this.

If it's still occuring, can you let me know which plugins you're using to make sure I've got the same configuration loaded to reproduce it and any scripts you're using that are causing the problem.

Thanks! I'll PM you details

post cut off

Right, I realised what this is. It's the error I mentioned before, that it can't find the relevant table 'cause the script isn't loaded. At this stage, MScriptableBehaviour depends on MScriptExt and MEvent because it relies on the MScriptInit event to be fired so it knows when to load the correct scripts.

At some point I'd like to try to make fallback for if you're not using MScript and/or MEvent, but I've got no idea how we can really get around this apart from the pretty hacky solution I had before.

Last edited by Nistur (2013-07-25 17:45:29)

It does when run alongside MEvent and MScriptExt, if those are missing it crashes as you said. I will try and add a marginally less hacky solution later tonight

Great, the Windows builds should be more or less the same as the Linux ones (setting environment variables etc) just, you can't symlink the engine nicely (at least... doing so is a little more difficult) so you probably will have to manually create the correct folder structure.

I'm just home now, and have to make food before I can look at any coding, but I'm struggling to think of a nice solution as they all pretty much rely on knowing when the lua state has been cleared to reinitialise things, so I guess I'm going back to the hacky solution of every instance will reload the lua script.

For reference, you can still use the "normal" method (using player { update = function(obj, bh) --[[ ... ]] end, } ) using MScriptExt and MEvent, they will just ensure that the scripts are run at the right time and only once, and allow for the more object oriented approach if you wish to go that route.

Sounds like you're using premake 4.3. It should work with premake 4.4

That's a file generated from MScriptableBehaviorPublishEvents.lua by bin2c.lua when premake is called.
Hrmmm.

Oh! I know why! It's because I implemented os.dir for *nix in the build scripts but I didn't have a working Windows box to write and test it. It just returns an empty list. Great. Sorry about that.

Edit: for now, we could probably just hard code the scripts to be embedded rather than try to list the directory. I'll take a look at it tomorrow

Last edited by Nistur (2013-07-25 21:21:01)

Hi marval. The plugins need to be compiled first. I'm using a build system called premake 4. You can view some basic instructions on how to use it just before the second screenshot in my tutorial. It will then require Visual Studio to build the plugin (assuming you're running Windows).

com3D has offered to provide builds of the plugins so users won't have to go through the above steps (the plugins such as MScriptableBehaviour.dll can just be copied into the project folder) but we have still got a couple of bugs to iron out first.

If you let us know which OS you're running on, we can try and supply you builds of the community branch of Maratis that you will need, as well as the plugins to test.

Without any plugins, you can assign lua values to objects as follows:

player = {
    obj = getObject("player"),
    speed = 3,
    update = function()
        -- use player.obj and player.speed here
    end
}

function onSceneUpdate()
    player.update()
end

with MScriptableBehaviour alone you can then do something like this:

local player_vals = {}
player = {
    onBegin = function(object, behaviour)
        player_vals[object] = {
            speed = 3,
        }
    end,

    update = function(object, behaviour)
        -- do something with player_vals[object].speed
    end
}

Note: update gets called automatically and you get the object ID passed in onBegin, update and onEnd functions

If you add MScriptExt and MEvent to the project, you can then do this (which is arguably a little nicer)

MScriptableBehaviour "player" = {
    speed = 3,

    update = function(self)
        -- do something with self.speed
    end,
}

Note: if you need the object ID, it's stored in self.__id.object but I'm hoping to remove the need for that soon.

With regards to accessing a specific enemy. It depends on which method of the above you're using, but assuming the latter you can do something like this:

local enemy = getObject("enemy01") -- or some other way to get an object ID
local behavior = player.get(enemy)
local speed = behavior.speed

Hope that all helps in some way

Last edited by Nistur (2013-07-27 07:19:35)

yes, it will. Until I get time to push to github again, you'll need MScriptExt and MEvent, but it will.

To store any variables you'll need to do something similar to post #9 or the second example above (post #45)

Try this :

player = {

objs = {getObject("player1"), getObject("player2")}, -- create a table that stores all the players
speed = {-0.4, -2} -- optional : set the speed of each player

}

function onSceneUpdate()

    for i=1, #player.objs do -- #player.objs is the length of the objs table (number of players)
        translate(player.objs[i], {0,player.speed[i],0}, "local") -- example : translate each player at their given speed
        if player.speed[i] > 3 then speed = 3 end
    end

end

NB: update = function() is for Nistur's MScriptableBehavior plugin only.

Last edited by com3D (2013-07-28 07:09:20)