Luasocket irc check to receive message

Question

I am trying to use luasocket to connect to an Irc channel and send and receive messages within my game (Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, If that helps).

Right now I am able to do all of that, with one problem. Once I set it to listen for a message, it basically locks up. I have a fallback command if I type stoplisten in Irc it just stops the script, And I can see it got all the message, but the game itself is locked up while waiting for the messages.

Any Ideas on how I would do this without freezing the game? I have just recently learned a little of coroutines So I do not know if I am using them correctly. I should also note I have access to a run frame functions which runs every millisecond if that helps (Though normally it is done like: if math.mod(currentTime, 50) ~= 0 then return end)

Here is the part in my code: http://pastebin.com/j1gCqm4R (I wasnt gonna edit all my code with an indent just to post it here, so i just put it on pastebin)

Answer 1

Your problem is that all sockets are, by default, blocking , which means they will halt (' block ') the current thread of execution (in this case, your game) until they either get the desired result or 'timeout'.

The solution is non-blocking sockets. invoke :settimeout(0) on your client socket object, and all future :send(...) :recieve(...) will return immediately, having either succeeded, or timed-out.

The LuaSocket reference contains the full details, but you will have to modify your code either to handle the 'timeout' failure state, or add calls to socket.select() to make sure that you only use sockets that are 'ready' to be used.