4 ms·

Cute but pkInterpretSource() doesn't have any throttling, like the amount of instructions/nodes to execute before suspending, this would be very useful in games

by dvh 5y ago

Cute but pkInterpretSource() doesn't have any throttling, like the amount of instructions/nodes to execute before suspending, this would be very useful in games. You could limit NPC's ai to 50 instructions or so so that it doesn't cause rendering lag and the ai script would be run in multiple frames until it finishes.

flohofwoe 5y ago
I guess the fiber/coroutine support would be a better solution to this problem? If this works like I think it should work, the code can decide itself when it is a good time to yield control back to the environment instead of freezing execution in a random location until the next frame. For instance when evaluating NPC AIs it may be important that an NPC isn't left dangling in a random state at the end of a frame, but either has finished evaluating, or hasn't started yet. https://thakeenathees.github.io/pocketlang/language-api-fibers.html https://thakeenathees.github.io/pocketlang/language-api-fibe...
- dvh 5y ago
  Code cannot decide when to yield because it doesn't know how many NPCs I am running in one frame. Maybe I need 10, maybe 2 longer and 8 just quickly for long running/low complexity jobs. If the limit is reached in the middle of "if" statement, e.g. if x < sin(5) + cos(20) then y = 5; If "x" and "sin(5)" was evaluated but not "cos(20)" then it should just remember VM state and continue next time. I did this in JS and it worked great for distributing NPC load between frames (https://twitter.com/dusan_halicky/status/1173924435923001344 https://twitter.com/dusan_halicky/status/1173924435923001344) and it didn't required any understanding of the code (I didn't need to carefully check when I need to stop execution), just VM snapshot and continue next frame.
  - skybrian 5y ago
    Since it’s a small language that already supports yielding for I/O, it shouldn’t be too hard to automatically insert an instruction into all loops to check if they need to pause. You could write it manually to prototype. (Or at least I assume it works that way based on studying Wren.)
pansa2 5y ago
> You could limit NPC's ai to 50 instructions or so The problem with this approach is that limiting the number of instructions doesn’t necessarily limit the amount of time taken. Any single VM instruction could be a call into a C function that performs a long-running computation. If you want to robustly limit the amount of time a script runs for, you have to actually time it.

by dvh 5y ago

flohofwoe 5y ago

I guess the fiber/coroutine support would be a better solution to this problem? If this works like I think it should work, the code can decide itself when it is a good time to yield control back to the environment instead of freezing execution in a random location until the next frame. For instance when evaluating NPC AIs it may be important that an NPC isn't left dangling in a random state at the end of a frame, but either has finished evaluating, or hasn't started yet. https://thakeenathees.github.io/pocketlang/language-api-fibers.html https://thakeenathees.github.io/pocketlang/language-api-fibe...

dvh 5y ago
Code cannot decide when to yield because it doesn't know how many NPCs I am running in one frame. Maybe I need 10, maybe 2 longer and 8 just quickly for long running/low complexity jobs. If the limit is reached in the middle of "if" statement, e.g. if x < sin(5) + cos(20) then y = 5; If "x" and "sin(5)" was evaluated but not "cos(20)" then it should just remember VM state and continue next time. I did this in JS and it worked great for distributing NPC load between frames (https://twitter.com/dusan_halicky/status/1173924435923001344 https://twitter.com/dusan_halicky/status/1173924435923001344) and it didn't required any understanding of the code (I didn't need to carefully check when I need to stop execution), just VM snapshot and continue next frame.
- skybrian 5y ago
  Since it’s a small language that already supports yielding for I/O, it shouldn’t be too hard to automatically insert an instruction into all loops to check if they need to pause. You could write it manually to prototype. (Or at least I assume it works that way based on studying Wren.)

pansa2 5y ago

> You could limit NPC's ai to 50 instructions or so The problem with this approach is that limiting the number of instructions doesn’t necessarily limit the amount of time taken. Any single VM instruction could be a call into a C function that performs a long-running computation. If you want to robustly limit the amount of time a script runs for, you have to actually time it.