Turning off/on for events handler

[Apeirogon]

Right now events is a more powerful scripting tool than acs. But they lack flexibility of acs in terms of control.
Like, I can run, stop, run again and terminate any acs script from any actor, and even from different actors. And events have only one position on this scale, on. And this is sometimes lead to glitches and freeze.

For example, I want to give to every single actor on a map some item, but only at several first tick from the "beginning" of a map. For this I, obvious, use "world spawned" event with condition

Code: Select all

if(level.time < 10)
give item

and this is works as intended. And it dont give anything to any actor which was spawned after the first 10 tick of a map time.

But, if player have fast firing weapon or some actors on map spawn much of a decorations like rain drops, smoke or sparks, or even worse, monsters which spawn 999nineninenine... projectiles in tick, when such weapon/actor/monster start to do its works this event cause noticeable performance drop just to realize that it dont need to do anything!!!!!!

So, such situations require possibility to turn off this event at all.
More precisely, I dont say "make a button to turn off ALL world spawn/world tick/etc. events pls) ", I say "I have "world item giver" event, which have "world spawn" and "world tick" and/or other override, and I want to turn off specifically this, "world item giver", event. Can you please make some way to do so?".

[Zhs2]

At the risk of invoking the evil and dreaded tenet of "just do x instead", why not iterate through every existing actor within a single early WorldTick (like, say, level.time == 1) for your effect?

[_mental_]

Create an actor that does nothing for 10 ticks, iterates all map objects on 11th, and destroys itself.
So, you only need an event handler to spawn that actor.

In general, dynamic (de)registration of event handlers is a good idea. The problem is it's not doable with the current state of ZScript.
Without full fledged callable entities (pointers to functions, 'first class object' functions, etc) it won't fly.

[Apeirogon]

I found more more suitable way, for me, after I realize that performance drop cause this single check in world spawn event. Network event which, after command from console event, use special thinker which give/take item to/from every actor. Probably someday I use menus, since now I poorly imagine how it works.

The problem is it's not doable with the current state of ZScript.

Too bad.

[ZZYZX]

I had Add/Remove event handler static function in one of the initial concepts. I don't remember why it didn't make it into the more final versions, but probably can be restored.
Either way there is EventHandler.Find (and StaticEventHandler.Find). It lets you return your object where you can then set some variable to true/false to pause the processing easily.