checking to see if a variable has changed

[Osbor]

sorry to be asking so many questions, but the documentation for shiva is still very sparse, and the wiki quite empty.

is there any way to do an efficient check to see if an object or a variable or whatever has updated? something with signals would be great. at the moment i have a system which checks the hour of the day every frame, when it only needs to know the hour when the hour actually changes (one frame every hour is a lot less overhead than 30 a second)

[neilb]

There's nothing that does it automatically, but you could use a HUD timer to send a message to your AI to do the hour check once every 30 seconds or however long you want to make the interval.

[NiCoX]

Yes, or using something like:

Code: Select all

function MyAI.onCheckChanges ( )
   
    -- Actual job
    --
    if ( ... )
    then
        ...
    end

    -- re-check 30sec later
    --
    this.postEvent ( 30, "onCheckChanges" )
end

[Osbor]

Yes, or using something like:

Code: Select all

function MyAI.onCheckChanges ( )
   
    -- Actual job
    --
    if ( ... )
    then
        ...
    end

    -- re-check 30sec later
    --
    this.postEvent ( 30, "onCheckChanges" )
end

oh man, i totally forgot about postEvent! that would work perfectly, since event sends are very little overhead. i could even set the actual clock function to only update the hour every, well, hour (and on initialization of course)