Slow AI

[britzl]

@Bateleur

You can’t really do that with coroutines unless you yield after some time and do the AI computations in chunks but that’s hardly a nice solution.

I think Lua coroutines can be used to achieve what you are asking. If you really need to use proper threads then sure, dmThread could be used. There is an old example made by a forum member here: Experimental Threading extension - #12 by kiprono

I’m not sure if the extension is still working, but it could probably be made to work. Note that thread safety need to be adressed.

@Bateleur

2- is Lua performant enough to hold in memory a data structure comprising tables worth 5 to 15 MB of data for retrievals only? No insertions or removals here, just lookups. I would assume yes since it must be implemented as a simple hash map. I know this depends on the structure itself but generally, are tables a performance limitation when they are big?

Yes, that is not a problem. Here’s an example where I load a 24MB JSON, parse it to a Lua table and print some of the values:

https://defold.com/codepad/#?c=#cp_sprite&s1=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