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I feel like I'm wasting a lot of tokens with counters/timers in my game.

For example, most of my timers work like this:

 
timer -= 1
if timer <= 0 then
 timer = timer_reset

 --do stuff here
end

So I'm using a lot of global variables to store the timer values and timer reset values, as well as it not being a function in itself. I did try to make a function from it with something like: 

function(timer, timer_reset)
 timer -= 1
 if timer <= 0 then
  if timer_reset ~= nil then timer = timer_reset end
  return true
 else
  return false
 end
end

But that only reduces the timer variable within the function, and not the original. When looking up on if there was a way to reference the original variable, I just found posts saying this isn't possible in Lua.

Is there a better method for this?

2

hmmm...

you could make some kinda callback thing

like so

 
function timer(timers,callback,callparams,calltime)
 add(timers,{f=callback,p=callparams,c=calltime,t=0})
end

function timerupd(timers)
 --loop through timers
 for timer in all(timers) do
  --increment timers
  timer.t+=1
  --if the timer has expired run it with the parameter table
  if(timer.t>=timer.c)timer.f(unpack(timer.p)) del(timers,timer)
 end
end

timers={} --create an array for timers

timer(
timers,--the timer array
print,--any func
{"hi"},--table of params
60--60/30fps=2 sec
)
--this prints "hello world" after 2 seconds (at 30fps)
--remember that you can also do function() -code- end as a parameter.

while true do
 timerupd(timers)--call once per frame
 flip()--use this to go to the next frame without _update
end

feel free to shorten everything, i was just making it readable
1

coroutines are a way to achieve that but won’t scale that much.
You can use closures to make it more self contained and more aligned with your initial ifea:

 
function schedule(time,func,...)
 local tick=function()
   time-=1
   if(time<0) func(...) return
   return tick
 end
 return tick
end

— example
local print_2s=schedule(60,print,”hi”,64,64,7)

function __draw()
  cls()
  — update timer until it elapses
  if(print_2s) print_2s=print_2s()
end


Thanks for the advice guys.

In the end I just stuck with my original timers, as yeah, it didn't scale much.



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